Meta’s Whisper Campaign Against Jonathan Haidt Demands Answers.

This week brought news that Meta employees met to plot a campaign to publicly discredit my NYU Stern colleague Jonathan Haidt, a prominent critic of social media’s harms to young people. Internal memos appear to record a series of team meetings on what was termed the “Haidt assignment”: a “Whisper strategy” about “[h]ow debunking Haidt can happen.” The participants discussed a desire to “get the academic community to disavow Haidt” and to “align across Policy, Comms and Legal” within Meta.

We do not know how far these discussions went, or whether they reflect a corporate policy or a rogue group within Meta. We do know that the company has neither publicly rejected the effort nor announced a review of it. At stake here are foundational principles of the democracy on which our economy has been built, and in which academic freedom plays a critical role. I have reached out to Meta for comment.

For almost a decade, the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights, which I lead, has urged Meta and other Big Tech companies to address the various challenges that digital products pose to rights and democracy. From social media, to virtual reality, from online games, to artificial intelligence, tech products have too often been released on the public with scant regard to public safety, despite increasing evidence of impacts on privacy, social and behavioral health, public safety, and democratic discourse. That work is part of our Technology & Democracy program. Many of these problems stem from product design and the business models behind it. All too often, Meta and its peers build products with aggressive data collection and engagement tactics to maximize financial returns.

Read the full Forbes article.
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Michael Posner is the Jerome Kohlberg Professor of Ethics and Finance, Professor of Business and Society and Director of the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights.