Meta stops working group that investigated the negative consequences of Meta products

Meta disbanded the team investigating the potentially negative effects of Meta products. The ‘responsible innovation team’ consisted of developers and ethicists who collaborated with product developers and privacy experts.

A spokesperson for Meta told The Wall Street Journal that the team’s approximately twenty employees will start working elsewhere within Meta, although not everyone on the team will be ‘guaranteed a new job’. According to the spokesperson, the work of the team is not carried out in any other way. Meta believes that designing good, safe, and ethical products can also be achieved by teams that tackle a specific problem.

Meta has been discredited several times for not guaranteeing the safety of its users. The biggest scandal was Cambridge Analytica in 2018, where data from tens of millions of Facebook users was unlawfully used for targeted advertising.

The page about Meta’s ‘responsible innovation’ is still up in the air. The Meta spokesperson emphasizes that the goals for responsible innovation will continue to be important to the company.