‘No One Paid Me to Disagree With Jonathan Haidt’ ⇥ made-not-found-by-danah-boyd.ghost.io

danah boyd, like Andrew Gelman and Candice Odgers, says she was not paid by Meta or anyone else to disagree with Jonathan Haidt’s conclusions about social media:

What kills me in the contemporary teens-and-tech debate is that there’s no space for actual research or critical nuance. You’re either opposed to the tech companies or in their pockets. And this week’s absurd discovery reinforces this infuriating polarity, painting those of us who are critical of Jonathan Haidt as being corporate shills. I find this especially frustrating because I did work in tech for a lot of my career. I played the role of friction inside many companies (although never Meta). I repeatedly got threatened by tech executives for challenging corporate mantras or providing research that contradicted their interests – and yet I persisted. Cuz many tech companies are far more complicated than people realize.

I had been meaning to link to a piece by Mizuko Ito, writing in the MIT Press Reader, for weeks; I think it complements boyd’s perspective:

We can advocate for features and policies that make platforms better for learning, belonging, and wellbeing. When parents and teens are asked, they want to keep using social media with more ways to flexibly protect their privacy, control recommendation algorithms, and monitor their own technology use. The emphasis on bans has come at the cost of progress on platform policies and features that make the online world better for people of all ages. These include privacy legislation and efforts centered on children’s digital rights and the duty of care.

You do not need to be paid by Meta — or Snap, or TikTok — to find Haidt’s conclusions unconvincing or unhelpful. But because some of its executives discussed following the same playbook as big companies in other controversial industries, like agribusiness, fossil fuels, and tobacco, in swaying research to be more favourable, the well has been poisoned. The people most visibly criticizing Haidt’s work insist they came to their conclusions entirely independently. I believe them. After those meeeting notes became public, however, I would not be surprised if many people do not.