MICHAEL USHER: Insiders reveal disturbing truth about Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta and the way it treats kids

The cracks are appearing in the metaverse of Mark Zuckerberg’s social media glasshouse.

Insiders are starting to tell the truth about Meta, Zuckerberg’s social media behemoth. And it’s an uncomfortable truth for the Meta founder and CEO who likes total control of his platforms — the way people use them and the way people view him and his company.

These insiders are raising deep concerns about Zuckerberg and Meta’s moral compass and questioning their values regarding child safety.

I’ve just spent some time interviewing these insiders for a new series we’re publishing on the 7NEWS digital platforms, and the way in which they describe their professional experiences with Meta are damning.

Specifically, they recall warnings to senior Meta executives, including Mark Zuckerberg, about harmful content and constructive ways to apply easily used filters to protect young users.

This content includes pornography, extortion, violence and intimidation. It’s well known that criminal gangs in Nigeria have used Meta’s products, including Instagram and Messenger, to sexually extort young men in particular.

The insiders I’ve spoken with in the US and Europe all tell a similar and disturbing story about the internal workings of Meta.

Time is running out for Mark Zuckerberg

Lots of noise about taking action and addressing concerns about making the products safer, but very little or no action at all.

Window dressing and spin, in other words.

These are senior-ranking professionals who say they’ve loved their work in the social media space and were genuinely excited to work with a progressive company with enormous global impact.

But all say they walked away disappointed and frustrated that simple measures they suggested to better protect users, especially children, on Facebook and Instagram just disappeared into a void of unanswered emails, or ended with meetings cut short.

It raises the question: does Mark Zuckerberg care about parents? Or families, for that matter?

He would argue, I’m sure, that his company Meta is family-friendly, and family-focused, but if you look at his actions you could reasonably conclude that Meta is ruthlessly focused on the single user on its platforms, and often that single user is a child who freely uses Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp or Messenger without anyone else having much control of that usage.

Restrictions, regulations, parent controls all get in the way of that free and often unfiltered usage and are being fought or legally challenged by Meta.

We’ve been looking into Meta’s attitude toward parents who are screaming out for help when it comes to controlling their children’s use and access to Meta’s platforms.

Mark Zuckerberg and his teams take the view, it seems, that parents have the responsibility to control their children’s use of Meta’s social media sites.

Any parent will tell you that’s impossible. That short of physically wrenching a device from your child’s hands and throwing it out the window, there is no way of accessing or controlling what that child is viewing or reading on Instagram or the others — even if you have strict windows of time allocated to your child to use their device and interact with these sites.

I think time is running out for Mark Zuckerberg to be putting it back on parents.

The clever ways Meta’s algorithms target and profile kids — through their ages, locations, likes and entertainment — is like opening the front door to your house at night and letting any stranger in.

The filters are few, if any, and it’s led tragically to some children being sexually extorted, bullied, or exposed to graphic violence. In some cases, young people have taken their own lives after being exposed to this.

Around the world, frustrated governments are starting to act to help support parents in fighting back.

They’re seeing appeals to Meta to take more responsibility for content on its platforms fall on deaf ears.

Or when concerns are noted, and Meta sets up consultation, it often leads nowhere.

Meta’s reluctance to take the lead and clean up its sites is forcing governments to propose greater regulation, and in some countries age, restrictions on accessing social media.

Meta could lead the way here, but for some reason Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t want to.

He could very easily shift a few lines of code or tinker with an algorithm to apply filters on content to protect kids from harm and help parents. But that isn’t happening.

He has taken some action recently after considerable exposure of the ghastly ways Nigerian crime gangs have used his sites to sexually extort young people.

Perhaps in one way, Meta is right. Parents do need to take responsibility.

But they could go one leap further and block their children using Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook altogether, rather than just limit use.

Perhaps declining interactions and numbers would steer Meta’s moral compass in the right direction.

If some governments like ours in Australia get their way, Meta will be legislated into controlling content or being held responsible for content on its platforms, and age blocks will be in place to prevent young teen users from going anywhere near social media.

The ball is in Mark Zuckerberg’s court. And anyone who’s dealt with Meta corporate knows he pays attention to negative publicity and is protective of his personal and professional reputation, so there’s a chance here.

Mark Zuckerberg — give parents a break, and help protect the safety of children.