Meta partners with the Center for Open Science (COS) to “topics related to well-being”. It appears the program will delve into our social media data, but on a voluntary basis, as COS says it will use a “privacy-preserving” dataset provided by Meta for the study. The agency says the study should help people understand “how different factors may or may not impact well-being and inform productive conversations about how to help people thrive.”
Details of the study remain opaque, but COS says it will use “new types of research processes” like pre-registration and early peer review. This last point is important because it sends proposed research questions to peer review before being passed on to study participants. This should help avoid bias and ensure the questions are actually useful. The agency also specifies that all results will be published and “not just those which confirm a hypothesis or support a dominant theory”.
As for a completely unscientific study on the effects of social media, using it for even ten minutes turns any dopamine in my brain into sadness swamps of The never-ending story. You might be the same. It's no secret that social media is essentially a factory that creates mental discomfort.
So why announce this partnership today? This could be a coincidence, but the timing is really funny. Meta is expected to testify this week before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee about his along with other social media bigwigs like TikTok, Snap, and Snap CEO Evan Spiegel, Discord CEO Jason Citron, and X CEO Linda Yaccarino had to be formally subpoenaed.
However, Meta has a particularly bad record in this area. After all, the company for allegedly harming the mental health of its youngest users. The suit claims Meta knew its “addictive” features were bad for children and intentionally misled the public about the safety of its platforms.
Unsealed court documents claim Meta “lusted after and pursued” children under the age of 13 and once discovered, they often fail to deactivate these accounts while continuing to collect data. This would be a clear violation of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998.
Another lawsuit alleges that Facebook and Instagram algorithms the complaint said Meta's own internal documents indicated that more than 100,000 children were harassed daily. Facebook's “People You May Know” algorithm has been singled out as the primary means of connecting children to predators. The complaint alleges that Meta did nothing to stop this problem when contacted by concerned employees.
With all of this in mind, it doesn't really take a study to recognize that user “well-being” isn't exactly the most important thing on the minds of social media CEOs. . Still, if the program helps these businesses move in the right direction, that's certainly a good thing. COS says the study will take two years and is still in the early planning stages. We will know more in the coming months. In the meantime, you can testify before Congress Wednesday at 10 a.m. ET.