The Open Secret: Children, Predators, and Meta's All-Male Leadership Team That Told Me Not to Write It Down
My Conversation With Bark on the Day Meta and YouTube Were Found Liable
I was in the virtual green room for a pre-scheduled conversation with Titania Jordan at Bark yesterday when word arrived that the Los Angeles jury had returned a yes on every single question, finding Meta and YouTube liable for harm to a minor. Just one day after New Mexico hit Meta with a $375M negligence verdict.
Titania and I process the verdict in real time, and reflect on our gratitude for the parent survivors who led this movement.
And in our subsequent conversation, I talk about what I found inside Meta’s Horizon Worlds leadership: an all-male team, an open secret that the platform was full of children on adult accounts, and an explicit instruction not to create any discoverable record of that knowledge. Harassment, racism, predators. I talk about being told my job was to silence another woman raising safety concerns rather than address them.
I also talk about what happened to me when I refused and was retaliated against. The autistic burnout that took away my ability to form words, regulate my emotions. The suicidal ideation that followed. And how the misogyny and disregard for ethical whistleblowers that exists inside companies like Meta gets coded directly into the products they build for your children.
We discussed my decision to not sign a separation agreement holding Meta harmless, the conversation I had with Brian Boland about what I could do to make a difference for those on the margins within Meta as well as the most vulnerable users of the product who were being harmed in their pursuit of profit above all else.
This conversation covers the litigation, Section 230, advertiser accountability, my decision to file a lawsuit against Meta, and what a genuinely safer internet for kids could actually look like.
Watch the interview here:
Or listen:
Here are some key comments from the interview and timestamps so you can navigate to the portions you’re most interested in:
ON THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE VERDICT
[4:45] “I’m thinking about all the parents, the survivor parents who have been the leaders in this fight for years. Some of them 15 years who are experiencing a moment of critical validation.”
[5:00] “I am just so grateful to the jury of our peers who saw through the smoke screens that many policy makers, regulators, and parents have been unable to see through, in large part due to the PR and propaganda mechanisms that these companies are able to deploy.”
[7:01] “I’ve been talking now for almost a year about how Meta knows that they’re harming kids and does it anyway. And that has impacted my life in pretty profound ways as well. And just to see that finally there seems to be some actual acknowledgement of that and justice for families that are impacted, it is just so incredibly meaningful.”
ON WHAT I FOUND INSIDE HORIZON WORLDS
[15:05] “It was a room full of, it was all men on this leadership team that I had joined and I was immediately read in on the open secret that the vast majority of the people using Horizon were children.”
[15:23] “They were accessing the product using adult accounts, which meant that they had completely open and unrestricted access to speak...children, sometimes under the age of five, sometimes teenagers, having conversations with unknown adults.”
ON BEING TOLD TO SILENCE ANOTHER CONCERNED COLLEAGUE
[21:31] “A man named Jeff Lin...said, ‘Yeah Kelly, we need to talk about that. We need you to shut her up and we’re going to find out if you’re as good as they say you are…It was as if everyone else in the room had just heard what someone had for lunch that day. Like there wasn’t shock, there wasn’t concern.”
ON THE INSTRUCTION NOT TO DOCUMENT
[22:40] “We were explicitly told we can’t create any record that’s discoverable of our knowledge that there are kids in the product.”
ON THE TREATMENT OF WOMEN INSIDE META
[34:22] “Out of the 20 of us that were VPs or directors in that function...there were I think like four or five women. And by the time I left on my medical leave, all but one were out on leave.”
[34:52] “The other women on the team were like, ‘All the folks that are potentially looking out for me are dwindling away. What does this mean for me?’”
[36:22] “[My boss] had both apologized for not doing more to get me in the room but then also told me that I wouldn’t be recognized for the work I did pausing the product rollout because of the way it would reveal the shortcomings of this senior man I worked with.”
ON MY AUTISTIC BURNOUT
[32:16] “I experienced a catastrophic medical event in that I almost overnight lost my ability to form words, to move my arms and legs, to get out of bed.”
[32:41] “Autistic burnout is a complete collapse of capacity to function. That often comes either in response to a moral injury or when demand exceeds capacity.”
ON WHY I REFUSED TO SIGN AND HOW MISOGYNY GETS CODED INTO PRODUCTS
[37:40] “I was thinking about the children that were in the product exposed to harm...and I just thought, I can’t sign this [hold harmless agreement].”
[42:39] “I believe that misogyny and that disregard for people gets coded directly into the products when these practices exist within companies.”
ON THE LAWYERS WHO TRIED TO TALK ME OUT OF IT
[43:08] “It was initially just a string of dudes saying, ‘Could you be so stupid?’ Like, every detail about your life is going to be exposed. Every mistake you’ve ever made is going to be pointed to. They are going to drag you through the coals and make an example out of you…It just pissed me off more.”
[43:31] “I almost died. In what world would it make sense that I would be more concerned about my reputation than about doing what’s right, when my kids almost grew up without their mom because of practices like this.”
ON NOT HAVING TO BE PERFECT TO TELL THE TRUTH
[44:18] “If I’m going to be made an example, I hope that I can be made an example that you don’t have to be perfect. You don’t have to have no skeletons in your closet to be able to tell the truth of your experiences and to be able to hold companies like Meta accountable.”
ON WHAT THE PUBLIC STILL DOESN’T GRASP
[53:28] “If we actually accept that there are individuals leading these companies who are becoming among the wealthiest in the world doing so, and they’re getting there by deceiving us about the harms to everyone, but kids especially, it requires that we confront our own roles in these systems.”
ON ADVERTISER ACCOUNTABILITY
[59:59] “The cheapest most effective CPM in the world is not worth enabling sexual trafficking, enabling suicide in young people. That’s actually what’s happening.”
ON THE IMPORTANCE OF TELLING MY OWN STORY
[1:15:29] “If I can write about that and get that story out and own that narrative, not only does it help take that power back and away from a company like Meta, but I hope that it also sets an example that we all have our differences, and that does not mean there’s not one size and shape of standing in your truth.”
Thank you to Titania, Bark, and their entire team for making the space for such an important conversation.
I read this part below and started screaming in my head. They knew exactly what they were doing and who their ultimate audience was for this “product.” Evil doesn’t even come close to describing these subhumans.
“And in our subsequent conversation, I talk about what I found inside Meta’s Horizon Worlds leadership: an all-male team, an open secret that the platform was full of children on adult accounts, and an explicit instruction not to create any discoverable record of that knowledge. Harassment, racism, predators. I talk about being told my job was to silence another woman raising safety concerns rather than address them.”
what a win, all your hard work and sacrifices have helped turned the tide!