This archive report was first published on 17 September 2021.
On September 17, 2021, the Wall Street Journal released a series of scathing articles about Facebook, citing leaked internal documents that detail the company's knowledge of its platforms' negative effects on users.
According to the Journal's investigation, Facebook's internal researchers found that Instagram harms mental health, particularly for teen girls. A 2019 slide deck stated, 'We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls.'
Another slide read, 'Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression … This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups.'
Facebook's head of public policy at Instagram, Karina Newton, responded to the WSJ story, saying that while Instagram can be a place where users have 'negative experiences,' the app also gives a voice to marginalized people and helps friends and family stay connected.
Newton claimed that Facebook's internal research demonstrated the company's commitment to 'understanding complex and difficult issues young people may struggle with, and informs all the work we do to help those experiencing these issues.'
However, the Journal's investigation also found that Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg has repeatedly maintained that Facebook is a neutral platform, but internal documents revealed that the company has a 'whitelisting' practice that allows politicians, celebrities, and other public figures to flout the platform's rules.
A 2019 internal review stated, 'We are not actually doing what we say we do publicly. Unlike the rest of our community, these people' — those on the whitelist — 'can violate our standards without any consequences.'
Facebook spokesman Andy Stone defended the practice, saying it was designed to create an additional step for enforcing policies on content that could require more understanding.
Additionally, the Journal's investigation found that Facebook's algorithm change in 2018, intended to improve interactions among friends and family, had the opposite effect, making the platform an angrier place.
A team of data scientists warned that the change had 'unhealthy side effects on important slices of public content, such as politics and news.'
Facebook's vice president of engineering, Lars Backstrom, acknowledged that the platform's optimization can be exploited, but claimed that the company has an integrity team to track down and mitigate these issues.
