FED UP

Meta Adviser on Suicide and Self-Harm Quits in Frustration

Lotte Rubæk claims the social media giant is doing little to protect teens, and that the panel she was on is just for show.

A Danish psychologist who has been advising Meta on how to protect users from suicide and self-harm has quit, claiming the company’s failure to remove certain content on Instagram shows it does not actually care about safety. “On the surface it seems like they care, they have these expert groups and so on, but behind the scenes there’s another agenda that is a higher priority for them,” Lotte Rubæk told The Observer. Rubæk said she has been trying to get Meta to remove triggering posts for the three years she has been on the company’s expert panel—to little avail—and in her resignation she told the company that she no longer believes the group “has a real positive impact on the safety of children and young people on your platforms.” A Meta spokesperson told The Observer that it is making “significant progress” on those issues and recently announced that it will hide suicide and self-harm content from all teens.