Court documents filed in a US school-district lawsuit against Meta contain minutes from an internal 'Well-being Meeting' in March 2023. The notes describe a deliberate strategy to undermine Jonathan Haidt, the social psychologist whose book The Anxious Generation became a foundational text for social media regulation worldwide — including Australia's under-16 ban. The language is blunt: get the academic community to 'disavow' Haidt, 'turn other academics against' him, make the media find him 'not credible.' The minutes reference Curtiss Cobb, Meta's then vice-president of research, as the driving force. The stated goal was not public rebuttal but a 'below-the-line campaign' — a whisper strategy designed to erode Haidt's credibility through proxies rather than direct confrontation. The document discusses getting someone called 'Gellman' to write 'a takedown piece,' an apparent reference to Andrew Gelman, the Columbia statistician who has independently critiqued Haidt's methodology. Gelman, for his part, published a blogpost this week stating plainly that he was 'never hired by Facebook to do a hit job on Jonathan Haidt.' He acknowledged receiving past funding from Zuckerberg's company on a 'no-strings' basis but said he was never asked to examine social media's impact on teen mental health. The distinction matters: Gelman's existing criticism of Haidt's statistical methods is well-known in academic circles, which is precisely why Meta's strategy identified him as a potential vehicle. The timing is notable. The meeting notes were produced before The Anxious Generation was published in 2024, meaning Meta was mounting a preemptive campaign against Haidt's Substack writings — before the book turned him into a global regulatory catalyst. The documents discuss responding to a specific Substack post in which Haidt reviewed academic literature on teen mental health. Whether Meta acted on the strategy outlined in these minutes remains unclear. Haidt responded to the revelations with the flatness of someone unsurprised: 'When companies can't dispute the evidence, they go after the messenger.' The framing is self-serving but structurally accurate. The minutes describe no plan to produce counter-evidence or fund competing research. Every action item targets the messenger's credibility, not the message's substance. The documents emerged through discovery in litigation brought by US school districts against Meta — a reminder that the most revealing corporate disclosures often arrive not through journalism or regulation but through civil discovery. Meta has been approached for comment but had not responded at the time of publication. The broader pattern is familiar from tobacco, opioids, and climate: when the science threatens the business model, the playbook targets the scientists. What distinguishes the Meta case is how precisely the strategy maps to academic reputation dynamics — leveraging existing methodological disputes to manufacture the appearance of organic scholarly rejection. The question is whether the academic community, now aware of the playbook, treats it as a data point about Meta's conduct or merely as inside-baseball about one researcher.
