To know, see, and shape

2021

Frances's laptop fan whirrs and her heart pounds as she drags the hundreds of sensitive documents onto a thumb drive. She holds her breath, glancing at the conference room door. A pulsing progress bar estimates the file transfer will complete in 4 minutes.

A chat notification makes her jump.

Frances -- finished reviewing the Safety Report. I toned down your language in a few places and left a few comments. Please send a clean copy by EOD.

She should respond. Act normal. Does she have time? There’s a chance that the file transfer triggered some internal flag. She could be locked out of the system if someone reacts quickly. She needs to get the thumb drive out of the building. The progress bar says 86%. With trembling fingers she types back.

Thanks Sean! Heading out for lunch, will finalize when I’m back online.

The computer chimes. Upload complete.

Frances stuffs the thumb drive in her pocket and heads straight for the parking lot. Reality ripples in heat waves rising from the pavement. Opening the car door releases a rush of hot air. Frances cranks the AC and remembers to breathe as she pulls away from Facebook HQ.

1 year later

Soni checks herself in the video call preview before logging on. Two white circles on her blue-light blocking glasses reflect the ring light above the monitor. Tacky. She takes them off and clicks Join. Her rectangle pops neatly onto the screen along with the other members of Meta’s Internal Safety Team.

“Good morning, Damage Control,” Sean Ramsey, Director of Product Safety, kicks off the meeting. “Our jobs are about to get a lot more important.” Everyone looks up from their phones and second screens.

“Yes,” he says. “Despite our Regulatory Team’s best efforts, Congress is expected to pass the Digital Youth Safety and Harm Prevention Act early next week –” He pauses as pixelated fireworks and clapping emojis erupt from the faces of some of the team members. Soni hovers her mouse over the reaction button, but the moment passes.

“Ha, yes,” Sean continues. “Platform safety has always been a priority in our little corner of the company. Now, it’s obligatory. Hopefully that will settle things. Anyway, what does this mean for us?” He shares his screen without missing a beat to walk them through the bill.

“Top of mind for our team are new reporting requirements on our minor users’ experience regarding bullying, harassment, and mood and self-image.” Everyone nods. They are essentially responsible for protecting the platform’s 3 billion daily active users from each other and themselves, like monitors of the world's largest day care.

“We’re required to file a Baseline Safety Assessment to the Department of Commerce within the next 3 months and report against that quarterly moving forward. This is obviously a significant lift, so here’s how we’ll divide and conquer...”

Soni scribbles notes as he talks and tries to read the room. She had joined Internal Safety just as a whistleblower plunged the division into an existential crisis under the twin scrutinies of national attention and corporate leadership. It was a relief to have a sense of what was coming next, maybe it would finally start feeling like she had a normal job. But something was off.

She raises a digital hand.

“Yes, Soni?”

“Does this mean we will see changes to engagement features? We know the algorithm is designed to be addictive and our research shows that feed addiction correlates directly with anxiety and depression in teens. Is that in scope for this reporting?”

The grid of faces goes still.

Sean frowns. “Let's be precise about what Congress legislated: reporting on content-related harms. If they wanted us to redesign around retention, they could have put it in the bill." He highlights the text on screen. "Our focus is content moderation to preserve psychological safety while on the app. Make sense?”

Soni bites her lip. So nothing was going to change. But she gives a thumbs up. Sean flips back to the slide titled Divide and Conquer.

“Anyway, Soni, I’m glad you asked, because I’m assigning you to help Ravi create the government-friendly Youth Mood and Sentiment dashboard. You’ve worked on that dataset before, right?”

“A little bit, for the meme review.”

“Awesome. Baseline assessment draft due in six weeks. And actually—" Sean skips to the next slide. "The inaugural Digital Youth Safety Summit is coming up in 12 weeks. We’ll be guests of honor, so you should all prepare to present on your tools to the folks in D.C. It’ll be regulators, academic researchers, advocates, the works. Good visibility for our team, shows we're taking this seriously."

You in the office to circle up on the Dashboard? Ravi asks via DM.