Facebook's own research show the platform negatively impacts one in eight users, report
The company says it offers a range of tools and controls to help people manage when and how they use Facebook services
Facebook ' s leaked internal documents have revealed that the company was aware of the fact that about 12.5 per cent of its users (nearly 360 million people) indulged in compulsive usage of the social media platform, impacting their sleep, work or relationships, according to a report by The Wall Street Journal.
The newspaper says it reviewed Facebook documents, leaked by whistleblower Frances Haugen, which show that most Facebook users surveyed perceived their compulsive behaviour to be worse on its platform than any other major social media platform.
The problems included a "loss of productivity when people stop completing tasks in their lives to check Facebook frequently, a loss of sleep when they stay up late scrolling through the app and the degradation of in-person relationships when people replace time together with time online," the documents showed, according to The Journal.
"I'm on Facebook every day, every moment. Literally, every moment; just not when I'm in the shower," one user told Facebook researchers.
Facebook calls these behavioural patterns as compulsive or "problematic use" although such patterns are more commonly known as "internet addiction".
The Journal says Facebook had a team that focused on user well-being and suggested a range of fixes to curb problematic use among users. While Facebook implemented some of the fixes, it disbanded the team in 2019.
In March 2020, the findings of the research were shared by the team in an internal presentation.
Pratiti Raychoudhury, a vice president of research for Meta, Facebook ' s new parent company, wrote in a blog post that the WSJ misrepresented the research, and selectively picked "from internal company documents to present a narrative that is simply wrong about how we use research to address an important issue".
She said that the company has built various tools and controls in recent years to help people manage when and how they use Facebook services.
The Facebook executive argued that the "problematic use does not equal addiction," and that the term has been used to "describe people's relationship with lots of technologies, like TVs and smartphones."
Ms Raychoudhury added that the firm has launched "nearly 10 products" to support people's healthy use of Facebook's apps, and that the problematic use of apps is an issue that impacts several firms.
The WSJ report is the latest in its ongoing Facebook Files series, based on internal documents provided by whistleblower Frances Haugen.
Last week, it emerged that the social media company was making a "major investment in youth" and looking to hire new employees with an aim to offer its entire line of products to users below the current threshold of 13 years.
Last month, Frances Haugen testified before a Senate subcommittee in a hearing about the Facebook's research into the impact of Instagram on the mental health of teenagers.
In a separate appearance before a British parliamentary select committee, she said that Facebook was exacerbating online hate worldwide because its algorithms are designed to promote divisive content.
Speaking at the Web Summit tech conference in Lisbon last week, she said it was "unconscionable" that Facebook is investing to build its virtual metaverse environment while the firm's own documents state that "there need to be more resources on very basic safety systems".