How ethical is Meta?
Our research highlights several ethical issues with Meta and its brands, such as Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, Threads and WhatsApp. These issues include its production of harmful products, approaches to privacy, excessive director pay, tax avoidance, climate impact, workers’ rights, and Israel-Palestine.
Below we outline some of these issues. To see Meta's overall ethical rating, and the full stories behind the rating, please sign in or subscribe.
Social media causes harm to young people
Although social media can have positive effects on its users, there is increasing evidence of its harmful and addictive qualities, especially among young people. According to Dr Hans Henri P. Kluge, World Health Organisation Regional Director for Europe, “it has been shown to lead to depression, bullying, anxiety, and poor academic performance.”
Campaigners and even courts have criticised Meta for the harm its products can cause, especially for young people. In March 2026, a US jury ruled that Meta designed addictive products that harmed young people. The claimant testified that she became addicted to various social media platforms, including Meta-owned Instagram at age nine, going on to become depressed, self-harm, and later develop body dysmorphic disorder and social phobia. Meta disagreed with the verdict, stating: “Teen mental health is profoundly complex and cannot be linked to a single app.”
Similar trials are ongoing.
Meta and privacy
Meta collects masses of user data which it then uses to sell highly-targeted ads to businesses. It does this through the use of technologies such as cookies and tracking pixels, which even track you when you aren’t using Meta’s platforms. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has even argued that although you might think of Meta as a social media company, “its primary business is surveillance advertising.”
Some of its products, such as WhatsApp, feature direct messaging with end-to-end encryption, which is best for user privacy. But this isn’t true of all its products. For example, as of 8 May 2026 Meta ended support for end-to-end encryption of Instagram direct messages. This means that Meta can now access direct messages, including images, videos and voice notes.
Ethical Consumer has ranked all social media companies on their approach to privacy. Meta and its platforms score 0/100.
See our guide to social media platforms to see the scores of other platforms.
Israel and Palestine
Meta scored poorly in Ethical Consumer’s Israel-Palestine rating.
Meta has been criticised for “censoring and silencing of Palestinian voices and narratives.” An article by Al Haq states that “ongoing monitoring and documentation efforts show that on Meta’s platforms Palestinian voices, especially those of journalists and human rights defenders, face significant and disproportionate censorship and limited reachability in times of crisis.”
Meta is also named as a campaign target by the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) National Committee. It is targeted because it is allegedly sharing data with the Israeli military. The BDS website provides a link to an article by Paul Biggar, titled: Meta and Lavender. It states Israel’s AI tool, Lavender, is killing people based on being in the same Whatsapp group as a suspected militant.
High pay but low tax payments at Meta
The directors at Meta receive a lot of compensation.
In 2025 the CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, received $25,125,903. In 2024 he received $27,219,873. The average income in Delaware, the state in which Meta is incorporated, is just $45,375 a year. Mark Zuckerberg is paid 55,273% more than the average Delaware citizen.
Tax avoidance seems the norm among Silicon Valley companies and Meta is no exception.
It has subsidiaries in tax havens including Delaware and Ireland, and has been criticised by tax justice groups including for failing to pay its fair share. In 2025 the Fair Tax Foundation published a report on “The Silicon Six”, which listed Meta as having the second-worst tax conduct of six dominant Silicon Valley businesses.
Climate action
Meta, like many of the Big Tech companies, scored poorly in Ethical Consumer’s climate rating and most have seen their real emissions increase in recent years due to their heavy investment in AI and the vast amount of energy that is required for this. They try to mitigate (or hide, depending on your viewpoint) these increasing emissions through superficial measures such as purchasing renewable energy certificates, which don’t actually reduce its emissions and can make it look like the company is producing less carbon than it actually is.
For example, in Meta’s most recent sustainability report, the figure it emphasises when reporting its carbon emissions is 8.2m metric tonnes, but this figure is artificially made much lower than its real emissions because it has subtracted the amount of renewable energy certificates it has purchased from the total. Its actual emissions are much higher at 15.6m metric tonnes. And this figure rises each year, representing a 148% increase since 2019.
Workers
Meta claims that it “strives to empower workers and protect the environment through open and frequent communication with our suppliers, initiatives that support safe, healthy and fair working conditions”. However, it scored poorly in Ethical Consumer’s rating that assess company approaches to workers’ rights and welfare.
While it has some policies which address the protection of workers in its supply chain, multiple sources found instances of worker exploitation. For example, Meta outsources some of its content moderation, which involves reviewing flagged content including extreme violence and child abuse.
This work is outsourced to other companies who generally operate in low-wage countries. The Bureau for Investigative Journalism found that workers have developed mental illnesses and “are forced to work at a gruelling pace in order to meet a series of opaque targets that dictate whether or not they are able to scrape by.”
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The text above was written on 18 May 2026 and the research was conducted in April 2026.