A group of Meta whistleblowers claims that the tech company hid the harmful effects of VR products on children by having lawyers intervene to shape research shedding light on the matter.
The revelation comes after a group of six company employees came forward to share allegations of the alleged cover-up. They argue that the tech firm, which owns Facebook, Instagram, and several VR products, deleted or doctored internal safety research that showed kids being exposed to grooming, sexual harassment, and violence inside its 3D spaces.
Meta Allegedly Hid the Harms of VR Products on Children
One of the whistleblowers who worked on Meta's VR research, Jason Sattizahn, said that the company was aware that underage kids were using its products. However, he said that Meta figured that children drive engagement and was making it earn profit.
This led the company to compromise its internal teams, manipulating research and erasing data that they did not prefer. Sattizahn and the other Meta whistleblowers are all current or former employees of the tech firm, according to The Guardian.
The whistleblowers are disclosing the findings along with a trove of documents to Congress to let the world know what Meta has been doing. Sattizahn and Cayce Savage, who was the firm's lead researcher on youth user experience for VR, will appear before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law on Tuesday.
A spokesperson for Meta, Dani Lever, said that the tech firm had approved 190 studies related to its VR Reality Labs since 2022. These include research on Youth safety and well-being. She added that the few examples compiled by the whistleblowers are being used to fit a predetermined and false narrative.
Company Whistleblowers Speak Out
The whistleblowers are accusing Meta of deleting evidence of sexual harassment of minors to protect its reputation. One instance showed a situation where Sattizahn was told not to collect data that could "implicate the company in future engagements with regulators," Tech Republic reported.
In a separate time, Sattizahn said that a teenager told researchers that users of Meta's VR glasses had sexually harassed his younger brother several times on different occasions. He and the youth researcher claimed that the former's supervisor ordered the recordings to be deleted.
When the internal report regarding the incident was published, it spoke of some parents being scared of this type of thing, but did not mention the sexual harassment. The documents shared by whistleblowers also include warnings from employees that younger children were bypassing age restrictions to use VR products, according to Engadget.
