Happy Nice Mall

SAN FRANCISCO — Over the past few weeks, top Facebook executives have met virtually for a series of emergency meetings.

At a meeting last weekend, half a dozen executives, including Instagram head Adam Mosseri and Facebook’s vice president of global affairs Nick Clegg, discussed pausing the development of an Instagram service for kids 13 and under. meeting. People said Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg weighed in on approving the decision.

People said meetings with a larger group that includes Facebook’s “Strategic Response” teams overseen by Mr. Clegg are continuing this week as well. The executives discussed what to do about internal research on teens and Instagram and decided to make some information public but add disclosure to add context.

Facebook has been in turmoil over the past few weeks, with meetings being held to suppress it. The turmoil started after The Wall Street Journal published a story. article series Last month, Facebook showed it knew the harms of its services, including teenage girls who said Instagram made them feel worse. The articles were based on a series of Facebook documents leaked by an anonymous informant.

The revelations immediately sparked a wave of criticism from regulators and lawmakers, many of whom took swift action to hold the company accountable. Upon review, Facebook Instagram has delayed its service For kids. Antigone Davis, Facebook’s head of global security, said on Thursday. questioned for more than two hours about the mental and emotional burden their services can place on children by legislators.

At Facebook, senior executives were engulfed by the crisis, the fallout spread to parts of the company and disrupted the “Youth Group”, which oversees research and development for kids’ products like Messenger Kids. employees who are not authorized to speak in public.

Two people with knowledge of the meetings said that to steer the discussion, operations directors Mr. Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg approved decisions on how to respond, but deliberately kept them out of the public eye. The company relies on “Strategic Response” teams, which include communications and public relations people.

People familiar with the company’s plans said the effort was so time-consuming that many projects that needed to be completed during that time were delayed.

But some of Facebook’s limitations have backfired from time to time with its own employees. The company this week downplayed internal research He argued that the journal’s articles were partly based on, suggesting that the findings were limited and unclear. Three people said this angered some of the staff working on the research. They gathered in group chats to denounce the descriptions as unfair, and some privately threatened to resign.

In a group text message thread shared with The New York Times, Facebook data scientists and researchers discussed how they were “embarrassed” by their own employers. On a company message board, an employee wrote in a post this week: “They’re making fun of research.”

“Facebook’s UX research team is one of the best in the industry,” said Sahar Massachi, a Facebook engineer who worked on election integrity and left the company in 2019. “Facebook should empower integrity researchers rather than attacking their employees. They do their job more completely.”

Anger is unlikely to die. On Sunday, the whistleblower, a former Facebook employee who leaked internal research, prepares to reveal his identity and discuss documents over “60 Minutes.” He will then appear at a Senate hearing on Tuesday to testify about what he discovered while researching on Facebook.

A Facebook spokesperson, Kevin McAlister, said the company is “under intense scrutiny and it only makes sense for us to form teams to streamline internal and external responses, and for those teams to assist with quick fixes in specific areas we need to improve.”

Since the publication of the magazine articles on September 13, Facebook’s “Strategic Response” teams, which have had many crises in recent years, have been struggling with reactions. The teams, led by company veterans Tucker Bounds and Molly Cutler, and acting under Mr Clegg’s direction, are seeking input from Facebook’s top researchers, he said. Facebook later pushed back blog posts That said, The Journal articles were inaccurate and devoid of context.

Executives also met on Facebook to discuss the future of research, two people said to have briefed on the searches. Some questioned whether the social network should continue researching its products, as companies like Apple say they haven’t done similar user studies. People said Mr. Clegg supported continuing the research, and others eventually agreed.

Mr. Mosseri also reached out to employees to allay fears about the company’s youth-oriented products. In an internal post on “Youth’s Health on Instagram” last month, she said she was “proud” that the company did the research featured in the Journal article, adding that “we invest heavily in safety and integrity.”

But some employees said the post shared with The Times did little to alleviate their concerns.

“If Instagram can cause 3 percent of our users to report strong negative thoughts (depression, anxiety, self-harm), I think it’s a problem worth investigating,” one employee wrote in a widely distributed internal memo. “Our policies for covering up such research pose difficult political, regulatory and legal issues for the company.”

Two employees said Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg had been briefed and approved of the decisions made in the past few weeks, but were not made public to stay away from negative press.

Mr. Zuckerberg posted a video Last week, while fencing with Olympic gold medalists, he shot the frames of new sunglasses that Facebook and Ray-Ban work with that can record video. On Wednesday, Ms. Sandberg posted a story on Facebook about small businesses in the United Arab Emirates. page.

Some projects were put on the table as executives dealt with the fallout. an attempt set up an election oversight committee delayed, two people familiar with the effort said.

On Wednesday, after meetings with “Strategic Response” teams and other executives, Facebook made it public. two research reports The Journal had partially grounded their story ahead of Thursday’s Senate hearing.

Facebook annotated the reports, making the results seem insignificant. The company is next to a slide in the research that says “young people struggling with mental health say Instagram is making the situation worse.” added that the title is not precise. Instead, “The headline needs to be clarified as follows: ‘Teens who are less satisfied with life are more likely to Instagram Instagram to say they feel worse about their mental health or about themselves.’

The two employees said Facebook researchers texted each other in disbelief after the statements were made public. People felt that many of the notes threw them – and their methodology – under the bus.

Facebook has also taken action to prevent future leaks.

A Facebook researcher said last week that the legal team contacted a colleague and was asked about a research report he published more than two years ago. He said his legal team appears to be on the hunt for any potentially incriminating research that could be shared with journalists.

His manager advised him not to run any queries looking for certain terms related to his former job or do anything that might seem suspicious.

Now, she said she was told, is a good time to take a vacation.