Meta and its 'whisper strategy' against Jonathan Haidt: lobbying in the shadows

According to the Guardian, documents filed in legal proceedings show that employees at Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, discussed a "whisper strategy" aimed at weakening Jonathan Haidt. This American social psychologist is the author of The Anxious Generation, a book that helped shift the debate on online safety towards tougher measures, such as Australia's ban on social media for under-16s. Still according to the paper, the staff considered ways of pushing "the academic community to disown him". What we don't know at this stage: whether the strategy was adopted, how, and who approved it. The extracts published do not say.

From here, it's our reading. And it starts with a word: "whisper". A whisper is the opposite of public controversy. You don't answer a book with another book; you murmur to well-placed colleagues that this gentleman is less serious than he looks. Common sense is also manufactured in the corridors.

This is where Gramsci helps. For him, domination does not rest only on coercion: it rests on consent, when one group's worldview becomes everyone's obvious truth. Academics, experts and "credible voices" are its gatekeepers: intellectuals said to be independent, whose word serves as currency in the war of position. To have a researcher "disowned" by his peers is to target exactly that currency. The aim is less to refute than to downgrade: to make concern look like alarmism, and alarmism look like bad science.

One can, moreover, criticise Haidt without any shame attaching to it: research on the effects of screens is genuinely contested, and all the better for it. The problem lies elsewhere. When the company in question owns the pipes through which debate flows, funds part of the research and employs armies of lobbyists, the "peer" discussion no longer quite has the neutrality we attribute to it. The dominant ideas, Marxist tradition reminds us, belong to those who also control the means of mental production. Here, the machine that manufactures opinion is also the thing being debated.

The paradox is delicious: the platform that claims to care about young people's wellbeing is mostly worried about the wellbeing of its business model. It is also worth noting that the press likes to present these affairs as "revelations" of internal misconduct, when they describe a routine: an industry leaning on its critics is the job, not an accident.

We will see what Meta says, and what the full documents contain. But the fundamental question is already on the table: who is entitled to define what is reasonable when we talk about our screens, and with what resources?