Court Filings Show Meta Weighed a Campaign to Turn Academics Against Its Loudest Critic

Court documents unsealed in federal litigation against Meta show the company weighing a plan to undercut one of its most prominent critics: social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who has argued social media is fueling a youth mental health crisis.

The filing centers on a document titled "Well-being Meeting Sound-check Notes," made up of dated bullet points from internal Meta meetings in March 2023. One entry describes a "Whisper strategy" aimed at getting Meta to "turn academics against Haidt." The notes are messy, full of typos and shorthand, which suggests they may have been early brainstorming rather than a finished plan. It's not clear whether Meta ever put any of these ideas into action, and the company didn't immediately respond to The Verge's request for comment.

The timing matters. By early 2023, Haidt hadn't yet published "The Anxious Generation," the book that would make him a household name on the subject of kids and smartphones. But he'd already testified before Congress in 2022 about social media's harms, and in February 2023 he started publishing his research and arguments on Substack. Meta was also staring down a wave of lawsuits over its product safety claims for teens, litigation that would eventually consolidate into multidistrict proceedings. According to the notes, Meta staff saw Haidt's growing public platform as a direct threat to how that litigation, and the broader public narrative, would play out.

"How do we get the academic community to disavow Haidt"

Under a March 7, 2023 heading, the notes show Meta's team reacting to one of Haidt's Substack posts reviewing research. One bullet reads: "turn other academics against Haidt — lot of strong methodologists to say things more forcefully." The document also names Jean Twenge, a San Diego State University psychology professor and longtime Haidt collaborator who has since testified in online safety cases. Another line frames the effort in terms of the legal calendar ahead: "Multi district litigation is next 2 yrs and his arguments will be featured there."

The notes go on to discuss "Strategic paths," including a "Media and academic elite facing strategy" designed to "percolate into the media." One entry, apparently from a specific team member, pushes back on the scope of the plan, arguing that "undermining H does nto go far enough" and asking what the follow-up would be.

A subheading dated March 8, apparently referring to Curtiss Cobb, then Meta's vice president of research, states the goal plainly: "how do we get the academic community to disavow Haidt." The next line reads, "Can't co-opt them, so how do we enrage them." The team described this as a "Below-the-line campaign," and one idea floated was to "Get Gellman to write a take-down piece." The filing doesn't clarify exactly who that refers to, though Andrew Gelman, a Columbia University professor of statistics and political science who has previously criticized Haidt's work on his blog, is one possibility.

Haidt's response

Haidt told The Verge he wasn't surprised to learn Meta had discussed strategies to discredit him. "When companies can't dispute the evidence, they go after the messenger," he said. He pointed to other material in the filings as more troubling than the Haidt-specific notes, including documents describing internal well-being research projects that were delayed or blocked by Meta's legal team. But he called the broader effort to influence academic opinion the most serious revelation: "If social manipulation was the heart of their strategy for responding to my writing, that is strong evidence that they had no way to rebut my research."

Gelman and Twenge did not respond to requests for comment.

A real academic fight, not just a PR problem

It's worth noting that Haidt's core claim, that social media use is directly responsible for rising rates of teen depression and anxiety, remains genuinely contested among researchers, independent of anything Meta did internally. Peter Gray, a Boston College psychology research professor and former colleague of Haidt's, recently published a book arguing Haidt's theory amounts to a moral panic, pointing instead to the rise of strict Common Core curricula as a driver of adolescent mental health struggles. Other researchers have raised similar objections, and several large-scale studies and meta-analyses have found little or no measurable link between social media use and teen mental health at the population level.

At the same time, Haidt's framework has resonated widely with parents, teachers, and teens who feel it matches their own experience, and he has substantial support within academia as well. That dual reality, a real scientific debate layered on top of Meta's apparent interest in shaping it, is what makes the newly filed notes notable. They show a company less focused on rebutting Haidt's research on the merits than on managing how the academic and media conversation around it would unfold, right as that conversation was about to collide with a courtroom.

What happens next will likely play out in the litigation itself. With multidistrict lawsuits over Meta's youth safety practices still ahead, these internal notes are now part of the evidentiary record, and plaintiffs' attorneys have a clear incentive to put them in front of a jury.