Court Filing: Mark Zuckerberg's Meta Shut Down Internal Research Suggesting Social Media Harms Users

A legal filing released on Friday alleges that Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, halted internal research suggesting that people who stopped using its social media platforms experienced less depression and anxiety.

CNBC reports that a legal brief filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California has alleged that Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, the tech giant behind Facebook and Instagram, abruptly stopped an internal study that purportedly showed the negative mental health effects of its social media platforms. The newly unredacted information, which came to light on Friday, is part of a larger multidistrict litigation involving plaintiffs such as school districts, parents, and state attorneys general against social media giants including Meta, YouTube, Snap, and TikTok.

According to the legal filing, Meta initiated the research, known as Project Mercury, in late 2019 to explore the impact of its apps on various aspects of users’ lives, including polarization, news consumption, well-being, and daily social interactions. However, the lawsuit claims that when the initial tests of the study allegedly showed that people who stopped using Facebook for a week reported lower feelings of depression, anxiety, loneliness, and social comparison, Meta chose not to “sound the alarm” and instead halted the research.

Politico reports that the filing includes communications between researchers that make direct comparisons between social media and drugs:

“IG [Instagram] is a drug,” Shayli Jimenez, a Meta senior researcher, is quoted as saying in one internal communication, referenced during a sealed deposition conducted earlier this year.

“LOL, I mean, all social media. We’re basically pushers,” another Meta employee then allegedly responded in the same conversation. (Jimenez said in her deposition, according to the filing, that those comments were made “sarcastically.”)

The lawsuit further alleges that Meta never publicly disclosed the results of its deactivation study and “lied to Congress about what it knew.” An unnamed Meta employee is cited in the filing, questioning the company’s actions: “If the results are bad and we don’t publish and they leak, is it going to look like tobacco companies doing research and knowing cigs were bad and then keeping that info to themselves?”

In a statement provided to Breitbart News, Meta spokesperson Andy Stone strongly disagreed with the claims:

We strongly disagree with these allegations, which rely on cherry-picked quotes and misinformed opinions in an attempt to present a deliberately misleading picture. The full record will show that for over a decade, we have listened to parents, researched issues that matter most, and made real changes to protect teens – like introducing Teen Accounts with built-in protections and providing parents with controls to manage their teens’ experiences. We’re proud of the progress we’ve made and we stand by our record.

Stone expanded on his comment in a thread on X:

The legal brief is part of a larger, high-profile multidistrict litigation in which plaintiffs claim that social media companies were aware of the mental health-related harms their platforms caused to children and young adults but failed to take action and misled educators and authorities. Google, the parent company of YouTube, also refuted the allegations, stating that the lawsuits fundamentally misunderstand how YouTube works and that the platform is primarily a streaming service, not a social network.