A day after damning internal research about Instagram's impact on teen girls leaked in 2021, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg questioned whether the company should stop studying social harms altogether. The revelation comes from newly unsealed emails in New Mexico's lawsuit against Meta, exposing how the tech giant wrestled with the public relations fallout of its own findings - and considered following competitors like Apple who largely avoid such research.
The unsealed correspondence reveals a pivotal moment when Meta leadership debated whether transparency about platform harms was worth the reputational cost. On September 15th, 2021, Mark Zuckerberg sent an email with the subject line "Social issue research and analytics - privileged and confidential" to top lieutenants including then-COO Sheryl Sandberg and global affairs chief Nick Clegg.
"Recent events have made me consider whether we should change our approach to research and analytics around social issues," Zuckerberg wrote, according to documents obtained by New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez. The timing wasn't coincidental. Just 24 hours earlier, The Wall Street Journal had published explosive findings from Meta's own studies, based on documents provided by whistleblower Frances Haugen, showing that "Thirty-two percent of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse."
What followed was a candid assessment of how Meta's approach to platform safety research differed sharply from its Silicon Valley peers - and not in ways leadership seemed to appreciate. Zuckerberg singled out Apple as taking the opposite tack. "Apple, for example, doesn't seem to study any of this stuff," he wrote. "As far as I understand, they don't have anyone reviewing or moderating content and don't even have a report flow in iMessage. They've taken the approach that it is people's own responsibility what they do on the platform."
