Two ex-safety researchers from Meta informed a US Senate committee on Tuesday that the social media behemoth concealed potential dangers to children associated with its virtual reality (VR) products.
”Meta has opted to overlook the issues they have caused and suppress evidence of users’ adverse experiences,” stated Jason Sattizahn.
This hearing follows a report from the Washington Post, which detailed the whistleblowers’ claims that Meta’s legal team intervened to manipulate internal research that might have highlighted risks.
Meta, the parent organization of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, refutes these claims and described the “allegations central” to the hearing as “nonsense” in a statement.
Mr. Sattizahn and Cayce Savage, who previously led research on the youth user experience for Meta’s VR platforms, informed senators that the company instructed researchers to eliminate evidence of sexual abuse risks associated with those products.
They further claimed that the company directed in-house researchers to refrain from conducting work that could yield evidence of harm to children from its VR products.
Before the hearing, Meta dismissed the allegations. The company asserted that the claims are “founded on selectively leaked internal documents that were chosen specifically to create a misleading narrative.”
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Additionally, a spokesperson mentioned that there were no prohibitions or restrictions on conducting research, stating that the company has recently sanctioned “almost 180 Reality Labs-related studies on topics including youth safety and well-being.”
Meta provides parental supervision tools on its Quest headsets, as well as within the VR game, Horizon Worlds. These tools enable parents and guardians to view and modify safety features and monitor which other players their children follow and are followed by.
However, during the hearing, Republican Senator Ashley Moody of Florida expressed her difficulty in navigating the parental controls, despite being one of the first attorneys general in the nation to sue Meta in court for allegedly endangering children online.
