Meta Platforms, which owns the popular social network Facebook, has cancelled the work of an internal team dedicated to studying the potential negative effects of the company’s products, including Facebook and Instagram.
The Wall Street Journal said Meta decided to dissolve the team known as “responsible innovation”, made up of engineers, ethics experts and others, which was evaluating potential concerns associated with new products and changes to both Facebook and Instagram.
A company spokesman explained to the American newspaper that the former members of the team would continue their supervisory work everywhere in the company, even though they did not have permanent jobs in it.
As part of the Meta strategy change, most members of the responsible innovation team will practice their previous work directly with other teams.
Eric Porterfield, a Meta spokesman, said that assessing the potential negative impacts of the company’s products “has become a greater rather than less priority” now. “We are expanding it by deploying dedicated teams of experts in priority production areas, and we have more people working on responsible innovation within our production teams than we did two years ago. So most of the members of this team continue to work elsewhere at Meta.”.
This comes as Meta is going through a phase of change, with its advertising revenue declining during the first half of this year, and it was forced to cancel its Live Shopping service and is facing a $400 million fine from the European Union for failing to protect its child users.
