Meta employees discussed a “whisper strategy” to get other academics to turn on Jonathan Haidt, the psychologist whose book The Anxious Generation helped push governments toward social media bans for teens, according to internal meeting notes filed in a lawsuit brought by US school districts. Notes from a March 2023 meeting say Curtiss Cobb, then Meta’s VP of research, wanted to “get the academic community to disavow Haidt” so the media would stop finding him credible, and suggest someone named “Gellman” write “a takedown piece.” Columbia statistician Andrew Gelman, a critic of Haidt’s work, said Meta never paid him to go after Haidt, and nothing in the filing shows Meta followed through.
