Overview
- Newly released court documents say a 2019–2020 Meta study, Project Mercury, found people who deactivated Facebook and Instagram reported lower depression, anxiety, loneliness, and social comparison.
- Plaintiffs contend Meta halted the research, did not publish the results, and later misled Congress in 2020 about what it knew regarding harms to teen girls.
- Former Instagram safety lead Vaishnavi Jayakumar testified that accounts tied to sex trafficking once faced a '17x' strike threshold and that Instagram lacked a specific in‑app way to report child sexual abuse material in March 2020.
- Meta says the deactivation study was methodologically flawed, characterizes the filings as misleading, and states it now removes accounts after a single strike for the most severe human exploitation and trafficking violations.
- The disclosures come from multidistrict litigation in the Northern District of California involving more than 1,800 plaintiffs and naming Meta alongside TikTok, Snapchat, and YouTube, with further proceedings continuing into 2026.