As a coalition of child protection organisations and experts from across the world, we are writing to
express our significant concerns about Facebook’s approach to protecting children from avoidable
harm and abuse, including as a result of the company’s commercial decisions and design choices.
The recent disclosures made by Frances Haugen and reported in the Wall Street Journal raised
substantive questions about how Facebook identifies and responds to reasonably foreseeable risks
across Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram.
We strongly welcome Facebook conducting research to understand the impact of its design
decisions on users, and recognise that this should form a crucial part of the approach to risk
identification and mitigation by online platforms. However, by any measure, it is difficult to
determine that the range of commercial and product decisions taken by the company to improve
children’s safety and well-being in recent years in any way correspond to the magnitude of the
issues highlighted by your own research, nor the extensive evidence of actual harm gathered by the
signatories of this letter.
Read the full letter here.