We interrupt our usual programming to inform you that I was never hired by Facebook to do a hit job on Jonathan Haidt.

So. I got some emails today from various people, pointing me to this item from a court filing:

This seems to be the story:

Meta internally set a goal to “get the academic community to disavow” and “turn against” professor Jonathan Haidt, who has linked social media use to mental health decline, as it in-house rebuffed internal efforts to study social media’s impact on teen health, according to recently unredacted documents filed publicly Friday. . . . Notes taken during a March 8, 2023, meeting show Meta Vice President Curtiss Cobb’s suggested goal for the “Haidt assignment,” was, “how do we get the academic community to disavow Haidt?” Under the topic, a sole bullet point says “can’t co-opt them, so how do we enrage them?” . . . The meeting notes also reveal that Meta employees discussed how the company could work with “the academics” to “get Gellman to write a take-down piece” on Haidt, referring to Columbia University statistician Andrew Gelman . . .

And this:

The employee wrote that Curtiss “thinks we need to focus on the media” to convince reporters that Haidt is “not credible.” Meta’s staffers also apparently discussed contacting a media figure referred to as “Gellman” to “write a take-down piece” about Haidt. It was not immediately clear who Gellman was.

It’s not immediately clear to me who Gellman is either!

But I will tell you this. I’ve never been contacted by anyone at Facebook or Meta regarding Jonathan Haidt or his work.

One of the above-linked articles mentions a court date from last year, in which “Meta abruptly settled the dispute, cutting a $17.1 billion deal with the states.”

$17.1 billion! OK, I wouldn’t expect all of that money, just for writing one little hit piece, but what if Meta had offered me $1.71 billion, or $171 million, or even just a trifling $17.1 million. Would I have done the job for them for that amount of money? I’d like to say, No, I’m too ethical for that, but . . . this a counterfactual about which we have no direct data, as they never approached me! My guess is that, had they dangled those dollars in front of me, I’d just have mocked them, kind of like how I mocked those Dialog 2022 scammers. But we’ll never know!

In all seriousness, this revelation about Facebook’s public relations team is absolutely horrible—we’re talking about some of the richest and most powerful people in the world conspiring to interfere with the open processes of science, journalism, and the law—but it’s hardly surprising, given what we’ve learned from insider accounts such as Careless People, the memoir by Sarah Wynn-Williams, or, for that matter, the despicable behavior of the bigshot legal teams in the Theranos and Cambridge University scandals.

Oddly enough, I have at times received money from Facebook; indeed, they’re listed on our sponsors page, along with other crowd favorites such as Disney, Amazon, and the U.S. Department of Defense. Back in 2016, Facebook gave me a no-strings-attached donation of $25,000 through Columbia University to spend on my research. This came from their data science team, which to my knowledge had nothing to do with the creepy behavior described above. I also spoke at their offices once (a technical talk, nothing about take-down pieces in the media), and they use lots of multilevel modeling, Bayesian inference, and Stan. Going through my old emails, it seems that we received some Facebook funding in 2020 for a computer science Ph.D. student who was working with me on a project involving probabilistic programming. We also applied for a couple of academic Facebook grants that we didn’t get. Also I gave Goel, Mason, and Watts some advice twenty years ago regarding their project on social networks that used a Facebook survey.

But nothing from them regarding social media’s impact on teen health. I guess that “get Gellman to write a take-down piece” was one of those bright ideas that never made it out of the conference room. Or else they approached a different person, maybe someone actually named Gellman.