MICHAEL USHER: Insiders reveal disturbing truth about Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta and the way he interacts with children

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

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

These insiders express deep concerns about Zuckerberg and Meta’s moral compass and question their values ​​regarding child safety.

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

In particular, they recall warnings to senior Meta managers, including Mark Zuckerberg, about harmful content and constructive ways to apply easy-to-use filters to protect young users.

This content includes pornography, extortion, violence and harassment. Criminal gangs in Nigeria are known to have used Meta’s products, including Instagram and Messenger, to sexually extort young men in particular.

The insiders I spoke to in the US and Europe all tell a similar and disturbing story about Meta’s inner workings.

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 high-level professionals who say they loved their work in social media and were genuinely excited to join a forward-thinking company with huge global impact.

But they all say they walked away disappointed and frustrated because the simple measures they suggested to better protect users, especially children, on Facebook and Instagram simply disappeared into a void of unanswered emails, or ended up with meetings being abandoned .

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

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

Restrictions, regulations and parental controls all get in the way of that free and often unfiltered use and are contested or legally challenged by Meta.

We looked at Meta’s attitude towards parents who are crying out for help when it comes to controlling their children’s use and access to Meta’s platforms.

Mark Zuckerberg and his teams believe that parents have a responsibility to monitor their children’s use of Meta’s social media sites.

Any parent will tell you this is impossible. Short of physically ripping a device out of your child’s hands and throwing it out the window, there’s no way to access or control what that child is watching or reading on Instagram or the others – even if you have strict time limits assigned to your child. child to use their device and interact with these sites.

I think time is running out for Mark Zuckerberg to blame it on his parents again.

The clever ways in which Meta’s algorithms target and profile children – based on their age, location, preferences and entertainment – ​​are like opening the front door of your house at night and letting a stranger in.

There are few or no filters, and this has tragically led to some children being sexually extorted, bullied or exposed to graphic violence. In some cases, young people have committed suicide after being exposed.

Around the world, frustrated governments are starting to take action to help parents fight back.

They see that calls for Meta to take more responsibility for the content on their platforms are falling on deaf ears.

Or if concerns are identified and Meta organizes a meeting, this often leads to nothing.

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

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

He could easily shift a few lines of code or tinker with an algorithm to apply filters to content to protect children from harm and help parents. But that doesn’t happen.

He has recently taken some action after drawing significant attention to the heinous ways in which Nigerian crime gangs have used his sites to sexually extort young people.

Maybe Meta is right in one respect. Parents must take responsibility.

But they could go a step further and block their children’s use of Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook, rather than just restricting their use.

Perhaps decreasing interactions and numbers would point Meta’s moral compass in the right direction.

If some governments like ours in Australia have their way, Meta will introduce legislation to control or be held accountable for the content on its platforms, and age limits will be set to prevent young teenage users from even entering the get away from social media.

The ball is in Mark Zuckerberg’s court. And anyone who has dealt with Meta corporate knows that he pays attention to negative publicity and protects his personal and professional reputation, so there is an opportunity there.

Mark Zuckerberg – give parents a break and help keep children safe.