Teachers’ Union Pushes Facebook Owner Meta To Take Closer Look At ‘Harms’ To Children

Topline

The American Federation of Academics on Wednesday encouraged the leaders of its members’ pension funds to assist an impartial analysis of Fb proprietor Meta’s threat administration practices, which the academics’ union stated have did not mitigate “clear threats” the social networking firm poses to youngsters and youngsters.

Meta has accomplished too little to forestall kids from being harmed by content material on its social media … [+] platforms, in keeping with the U.S.’s second-largest academics’ union.

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Key Details

AFT President Randi Weingarten asked state and native pension fund trustees, whose funds maintain $6.3 billion in Meta inventory, to vote in favor of a shareholder resolution that may instruct Meta’s board of administrators to rent a regulation agency to guage the board’s efficiency at managing the dangers posed by Fb and Instagram.

Weingarten said that AFT members have labored to assist college students affected by melancholy, anxiousness and different problems that Weingarten attributed to Fb and Instagram content material.

In a filing, Meta’s board denied taking a cavalier strategy to threat administration and really useful shareholders vote in opposition to the proposal, claiming a third-party analysis was pointless as a result of it will not end in appreciably higher efficiency from the committee.

Tangent

With 1.7 million members, the AFT is the second largest academics’ union within the U.S. after the Nationwide Training Affiliation, which says it has 3 million members.

Key Background

The AFT’s announcement got here in the future after the union hosted an internet town hall event with Frances Haugen, a former Fb product supervisor who in 2021 leaked hundreds of pages of the corporate’s inner documents to the Wall Road Journal. These paperwork confirmed the corporate knew a few of its merchandise harmed customers: One doc posted to Fb’s inner messaging board claimed 32% of youngster ladies with body-image points felt worse after utilizing Instagram, the Wall Road Journal reported. Haugen informed Congress that Fb and Instagram knew methods to make their platforms safer, however had been reluctant to threat their revenue margins to take action. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta (then Fb), responded in a Facebook post by decrying the media’s “false image” of the corporate based mostly on Haugen’s leaks and claiming the corporate’s analysis discovered Instagram usually had a optimistic impact on teenage ladies’ feelings. Zuckerberg additionally stated he has lengthy advocated for higher authorities regulation of social media platforms. Regardless of these scandals, 55% of U.S. adults nonetheless had a optimistic view of Fb in November, in keeping with a Morning Seek the advice of poll. About 69% of U.S. adults use Fb and about 40% use Instagram, Pew Analysis Middle present in a 2021 poll.