09/08/2025

Employees Say Meta Suppressed Research on Child Safety

The company’s lawyers alleged intervened to reshape negative research

At her home in western Germany, a woman told a team of visiting researchers from Meta that she did not allow her sons to interact with strangers on the social media giant’s virtual reality headsets. Then her teenage son interjected, according to two of the researchers: He frequently encountered strangers, and adults had sexually propositioned his little brother, who was younger than 10, numerous times.

"I felt this deep sadness watching the mother’s response," one of the researchers, Jason Sattizahn, told The Washington Post regarding the April 2023 conversation. "Her face in real time displayed her realization that what she thought she knew of Meta’s technology was completely wrong."

Meta had publicly committed to making child safety a top priority across its platforms. But Sattizahn and the second researcher, who specializes in studying youths and technology, said that after the interview, their boss ordered the recording of the teen’s claims deleted, along with all written records of his comments. An internal Meta report on the research said that in general, German parents and teens feared grooming by strangers in virtual reality — but the report did not include the teen’s assertion that his younger sibling actually had been targeted.

Please select this link to read the complete article from The Washington Post.