Meta’s Quiet Adoption: Dodging Responsibility in Social Media’s Mental Toll

Currently, many experts are discussing the negative influence of social media on an individual’s psychological state. Recent documents confirm that Meta was well aware of this issue several years ago but chose to conceal it. According to the documents in a class action lawsuit filed by several U.S. school districts against Meta and other social networks, the company had initiated Project Mercury in 2020. Within this project, Meta’s scientists, in collaboration with Nielsen, evaluated the effect of “deactivating” Facebook and Instagram.

Simply put, participants of the study temporarily stopped using Meta’s social networks entirely, which significantly impacted their well-being. According to Meta’s documents obtained during the research, to the company’s disappointment, people who stopped using Facebook for just a week reported feeling less depression, anxiety, loneliness, and social comparison.

In the end, instead of continuing the research or publishing even preliminary data, Meta shut the project down. Even for its employees, the company attempted to justify the results by claiming they were distorted by the media coverage around the company at the time. The lawsuit claims that despite Meta’s own research confirming a causal link between its platforms and the negative impact on users’ mental health, Meta told the U.S. Congress at a hearing that it could not quantitatively assess if its products were harmful to teenage girls. The lawsuit was filed by the law firm Motley Rice against Meta, Google, TikTok, and Snapchat. The company Meta (Facebook and Instagram) is recognized as extremist and banned in Russia.