Meta halted internal research suggesting social media harm: court filing
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta Platforms Inc., at a dinner with technology leaders at the White House State Dining Room on Thursday, September 4, 2025 in Washington, DC, United States. US President Donald Trump said he would impose taxes on semiconductor imports “very soon”, but Apple Inc., which has promised to increase US investments, He said that companies such as will back up their goods. Photographer: Will Oliver/EPA/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Will Oliver | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Meta Facebook has halted internal studies that purported to show that people who stopped using Facebook became less depressed and anxious, according to a legal document unsealed Friday.
The social media giant allegedly launched the study, called Project Mercury, in late 2019 to help it “explore the impact of our apps on polarization, news consumption, well-being, and daily social interactions,” according to the complaint filed in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California.
The complaint contains new unedited information regarding Meta.
The newly released legal brief relates to high-profile multidistrict lawsuits filed against social media companies like Meta by a variety of plaintiffs, including school districts, parents, and state attorneys general. Google’s YouTube, explode and TikTok.
The plaintiffs allege that these businesses knew that their respective platforms were causing a variety of mental health-related harms to children and young adults, but failed to act and instead misled educators and authorities.
“We strongly disagree with these claims, which are based on cherry-picked quotes and misinformed opinions intended to present a deliberately misleading picture,” Meta spokesman Andy Stone said in a statement. he said. “The full record will show that for more than a decade we have been listening to parents, researching the issues that matter most, and making real changes to protect teens—like introducing Teen Accounts with built-in protections and giving parents controls to manage their teens’ experiences.”
Google, Snap and TikTok did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The 2019 Meta study was based on a random sample of consumers who stopped their use of Facebook and Instagram for a month, the lawsuit said. The lawsuit alleged that Meta was disappointed that early tests of the study showed that people who stopped using Facebook “reported lower feelings of depression, anxiety, loneliness, and social comparison over the course of a week.”
The lawsuit alleged that Meta chose not to “sound the alarm,” but instead halted the investigation.
“The company never publicly disclosed the results of the deactivation study,” according to the lawsuit. “Instead, Meta lied to Congress about what he knew.”
The lawsuit alleges an unnamed Meta employee said: “If the results are bad and we don’t publish them and they leak, will it look like tobacco companies did research and knew cigarettes were bad and then kept that information to themselves?”
Stone, a series social media posts, walked back its implication that it shut down the internal investigation after the lawsuit allegedly showed a causal relationship between Meta’s practices and adverse mental health effects.
Stone called the 2019 study flawed and said that was why the company expressed disappointment. Stone said the study found that only “people who believed using Facebook was bad for them felt better when they stopped using it.”
“This is a confirmation of other public studies (“deactivation studies”) that show the same effect,” Stone said in a separate post. “It makes intuitive sense but shows nothing about the real impact of using the platform.”
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