I’ve written two rants about the insulting and ineffective PR stylings of Meta Communications VP Andy Stone: November’s Meta is earning billions from scams and fraud; their lack of transparency is an insult, followed by January’s Why is Meta still feeding us garbage in response to their scam ads scandal? I’m back for round three, because Andy’s done it again, this time as part of Meta’s tone-deaf response to losing two major liability cases over harm to children and teens.
Meta and the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad verdicts
As I’ve discussed for the past couple of weeks, there’s a lot of debate and concern about what social media is doing to children and teens. In recent weeks, two juries have weighed in. On March 24, a New Mexico jury fined Meta $375 million for misleading consumers about the safety of its platforms and endangering children. The next day, a California jury fined Meta $4.2 million and Google $1.8 million for designing social media platforms that are harmful to young people.
On their own, these fines are meaningless to Meta. They could pay the damages of fifty New Mexico-sized cases a quarter just out of their profits, without dipping into their $80 billion bank account. Meta’s problem is that these cases are just the opening salvo. Over 2,400 lawsuits against Meta, TikTok, and other social media platforms are pending, and these recent verdicts just gave them all hope for victory. Even Meta can’t afford to lose thousands of cases and pay damages to tens of millions of families.
So naturally, Meta is taking these verdicts seriously and has assembled a SWAT team of their best people to redesign their products to reduce harm to children and teens, right?
Ha, don’t make me laugh. This is Meta. They don’t do that here. They’re denying everything and fighting back.
The censorship will continue until morale improves
Enterprising class action lawyers jumped on the Meta-sucks bandwagon with the impressively cheeky move of advertising for new plaintiffs on Facebook and Instagram. Meta wasn’t having it, and promptly took the ads down.
For a normal business, it’s pretty understandable to not want to play host to the opposition. Hotels aren’t going to let you promote your Airbnb rental in their lobby, and peace activists wouldn’t last long at a military trade show.
The issue is more complicated for Meta, because they’re not just any company. They’re home to the communities and businesses of billions of people. They’ve earned this position by claiming to be a trustworthy platform with clear rules laid out in Terms of Service, Community Guidelines, and Privacy Policies. Plus, lawsuits over harms to children and teens are part of a serious debate about the role of technology in our society. They aren’t “the competition.”
Surely Meta knows this, so they were scrupulous and transparent about their decision to pull the ads, in order to use it as an opportunity to explain themselves and build trust, right?
Of course not. Meta is who we thought they were, and this is Andy Stone we’re talking about. When Axios broke the story in early April and asked Meta for a comment, he unloaded the following instant classic of bad spin:
We're actively defending ourselves against these lawsuits and are removing ads that attempt to recruit plaintiffs for them. We will not allow trial lawyers to profit from our platforms while simultaneously claiming they are harmful.
A literal haiku of bullshit
We will not allow / trial lawyers to profit / from our platforms. [It scans if you pronounce “our” with two syllables. Humor me, I’m on a roll.] Andy has to know this is shameless double-speak. Meta is the only one profiting here, not the lawyers! The lawyers are giving Meta money to run their ads. Nobody’s paying the lawyers yet. Class action lawyers usually work on contingency, where they only get paid if they win the case. If Meta is confident that they will win these cases, then they have nothing to worry about, because the lawyers can’t possibly profit.
Andy might have gotten away with this if he’d shown even an iota of maturity or nuance in his statement. He could have restated Meta’s commitment to child safety. Reflected on the free speech implications of the issue. Cited the policy that the lawyers violated. Issued a bland statement of interest in dialogue versus confrontation. He wouldn’t have to mean any of it, of course. Just some syntactic sugar and a nod toward the complex reality that we live in. Instead, he chose defiance.
Who is Andy’s intended audience for this statement? He has to have known that it wasn’t going to win anyone over to Meta’s point of view. All he’s earned from it is a bipartisan letter from senators Marsha Blackburn and Amy Klobuchar criticizing the ads takedown, and repeating all of the recent leaks about ill-gotten gains and bad-faith enforcement (that Andy has also failed to defuse in any way).
I suspect that Andy is playing to his base. His real audience is Meta executives with a persecution complex. Maybe they’re contemptuous of the jurors and think they don’t understand reality. Maybe they’re fully on-board with the Silicon Valley billionaires who think we ought to be more grateful (see Palantir offers us Guardianship at gunpoint). Maybe they’re just in battle mode in order to avoid billions of dollars of payouts.
Even granting this, it’s terrible PR work. Andy is a senior communications executive at one of the world’s largest and most profitable companies. People like him are supposed to know what they’re doing. If there’s no way to say anything that will please your internal paymasters and be even remotely credible to the public, there’s an easy answer: keep your mouth shut and say “no comment.”
Postscript: the policy is garbage, too
Despite there being no rule in Meta’s advertising standards to justify the ads takedown, Axios helpfully suggested they were basing it on a clause in the Meta terms of service: "We also can remove or restrict access to content, features, services, or information if we determine that doing so is reasonably necessary to avoid or mitigate misuse of our services or adverse legal or regulatory impacts to Meta." [Emphasis mine.]
Thanks to the Applied Social Media Lab’s fantastic Transparency Hub, I was able to track down exactly when Meta set up this shadow censorship system to defend their corporate interests: between October 2020 and April 2021. What happened in between these two dates? The FTC sued Meta for antitrust violations in December 2020. In other words: when the government moved in, Meta cracked down.
I hate this. Blurring the lines between “bad for the community” and “bad for Meta” discredits the entire notion of trust and safety. If people can never be sure whether the company is acting in good faith or selfishly, how can they trust any enforcement action at all? (See Thoughts on Casey Newton and TrustCon: corporate incentives, conflating bad and illegal.)
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