By Jody Godoy
(Reuters) -Facebook parent Meta Platforms put profit from its virtual-reality platform over safety, two former researchers told a Senate panel on Tuesday.
Former Meta user experience researcher Cayce Savage said the company shut down internal research showing Meta knew children were using its VR products and being exposed to sexually explicit material.
“Meta cannot be trusted to tell the truth about the safety or use of its products,” Savage said at the hearing before the Senate subcommittee on privacy and technology.
Meta has come under fire from members of Congress in recent weeks, after Reuters exclusively reported on an internal policy document that permitted the company’s chatbots to “engage a child in conversations that are romantic or sensual.”
“Does it surprise you that they would allow their chatbot to engage in these conversations with children?” Senator Marsha Blackburn, a Tennessee Republican, asked former Meta Reality Labs researcher Jason Sattizahn, who also testified at the hearing on Tuesday.
“No, not at all,” he said.
Meta has previously said the examples reported by Reuters were inconsistent with the company’s policies and had been removed.
Savage and Sattizahn are part of a group of current and former Meta employees whose whistleblower claims were first reported by the Washington Post on Monday.
Researchers were told not to investigate harms to children using its VR technology so that it could claim ignorance of the problem, Savage said. Savage encountered instances of children being bullied, sexually assaulted and asked for nude photographs in the course of her work, she said.
Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said in a statement that the claims are “based on selectively leaked internal documents that were picked specifically to craft a false narrative,” and that “there was never any blanket prohibition on conducting research with young people.”
Blackburn said at the hearing that the whistleblower accounts further underline the need for Congress to pass the Kids Online Safety Act, a bill she co-sponsored which the Senate passed last year but which failed in the U.S. House of Representatives.
(Reporting by Jody Godoy in New YorkEditing by Matthew Lewis)
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