In March 2023, with a wave of kids-safety lawsuits heading toward trial, a group of Meta employees sat down for a well-being meeting and wrote down an idea. They called it a “whisper strategy.” The goal, according to newly unsealed court documents, was to “turn academics against Haidt” — Jonathan Haidt, the social psychologist whose warnings about social media and teenage mental health had made him one of the most influential voices criticising Big Tech.
The documents, reported by The Verge and the New York Post, do not show a campaign. They show a conversation. And that is what makes them worth reading: they capture, in shorthand and typos, a company under legal pressure discussing how to manage a critic’s credibility.
The whisper strategy notes
The document is labelled “Well-being Meeting Sound-check Notes,” and it appears in a recent filing in the federal litigation against Meta over its product safety claims for teenagers. In multiple meetings, Meta employees appear to have discussed ways to undermine Haidt, according to The Verge. A subheading in the notes is dated Tuesday, March 7, 2023.
The notes are blunt. The team discussed the viability of a “whisper strategy” to “turn academics against Haidt.” In the notes, the team asked itself: “[H]ow do we get the academic community to disavow Haidt”?
One entry records that Curtiss — an executive the Post reports is likely a reference to Meta’s research chief Curtiss Cobb — had set a “goal” to discredit Haidt, and thought the team should “focus on the media” to convince reporters that Haidt is “not credible.” Staffers also discussed contacting a media figure referred to only as “Gellman” to “write a take-down piece” about Haidt. It was not immediately clear who Gellman was.
Read plainly, the notes describe a company weighing how to undercut a key critic’s credibility; they do not establish whether anything followed.
The critic
A social psychologist at New York University’s Stern School of Business, Haidt testified about his conclusions before Congress in 2022. In February 2023, he began posting more of his theories and research to Substack, under the newsletter After Babel. He had not yet published The Anxious Generation.
That book, The Anxious Generation, came out on March 26, 2024, and debuted at number one on the New York Times bestseller list. Its argument is that smartphones and social media rewired childhood and drove a surge in adolescent anxiety and depression.
But Haidt’s causal claims have long been contested inside academia. Candice Odgers, a developmental psychologist at the University of California, Irvine, wrote in a review in Nature that the evidence is mixed and blurry, noting that “hundreds of researchers, myself included, have searched for the kind of large effects suggested by Haidt” and that “most data are correlative.” Andrew Przybylski found the average correlation between screen time and well-being to be analogous to the correlation between wearing glasses and well-being. The Nature review concluded there is “no evidence that using these platforms is rewiring children’s brains or driving an epidemic of mental illness.”
That debate is the point the notes seem to miss. Haidt’s thesis has been challenged in public, by other scientists, on the evidence. The notes discuss a further route: quietly shifting who the academic community trusts.
The courtroom
The notes surfaced in the federal multidistrict litigation in California, where thousands of cases making similar claims about social media addiction and online harm are being streamlined into a handful of “bellwether” cases. A coalition of school districts has accused Meta of fuelling a teen mental health crisis. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers is overseeing the case.
The documents were unsealed only after a long fight. Plaintiffs accused Meta of abusing attorney-client privilege to withhold or redact thousands of company records; Judge Gonzalez Rogers ultimately ordered the appointment of an independent special master — retired US Judge Suzanne Segal — to review the company’s classifications for some 170,000 documents and determine which were properly withheld.
The same tranche of documents contained other awkward material. A March 2023 email shows a Meta employee complaining that the company’s legal team was “trying to block or redesign” a planned study on “youth social emotional trends.” And in a December 2022 email, Nick Clegg, Meta’s former head of global affairs, wrote that a potential presentation on youth well-being to the National Academies of Sciences could invite questions “on topics of design that we had hoped to avoid.”
Judge Gonzalez Rogers has not hidden her impatience. At an October 9 hearing, she criticised Meta over the company’s attorney-client privilege caps. “I have never seen a company whose employees are so taken with the attorney-client privilege that they’d have caps made,” she said.
What the notes don’t prove
Honesty requires saying what the filing does not establish. The notes are riddled with typos and shorthand, suggesting they contain initial ideas rather than fully formed plans. It is unclear whether Meta acted on any of the ideas in them. Meta did not immediately provide a comment to The Verge on the filing, and representatives for Meta and Haidt did not immediately return the Post’s request for comment.
There is a real difference between a team brainstorming in a meeting and a company executing a plan, and the documents as reported do not close that gap. The story here is not that Meta ran a secret campaign against Jonathan Haidt. It is that the well-being team discussed doing so, and that the discussion treated the credibility of a critic as something to be worked on, quietly, through academics and the press.
That distinction matters. If the notes had described a debate about the evidence — effect sizes, correlation and causation, what the research actually shows — they would be unremarkable. Companies argue about science all the time. What the notes describe is a discussion about the messenger.
Why it matters now
The context has changed sharply since March 2023. On March 25, 2026, a Los Angeles jury found Meta and Google liable in the first social-media-addiction case to reach a jury verdict in the United States, awarding $6 million to a young woman who had used YouTube from the age of six and Instagram from nine. Meta bore 70 percent of the damages. Mark Zuckerberg testified before the jury in February 2026. In August 2026, Meta agreed to pay up to $17.1 billion to resolve claims brought by dozens of states alleging that Instagram and Facebook exposed young users to serious mental harms and used addictive features to drive engagement.
After the Los Angeles verdict, Haidt wrote that “history will judge them as harshly as the tobacco industry.” Fairplay, the children’s advocacy group, was blunter about the newly unsealed notes. “These internal documents from Meta demonstrate once again that the company is far more concerned with managing its reputation than actually making Instagram safer and less addictive for young people,” its executive director, Josh Golin, said in a statement.
That is the affair here. Not a proven campaign, but a documented discussion: the notes show a team weighing how to undercut a critic’s credibility. What they cannot show, on their own, is whether the team was amplifying a live scholarly dispute or reaching for something wider — or what other safety and research work was happening at the same time. Whether anything followed from the discussion remains unresolved in the reporting so far.
