KIRILL KUDRYAVTSEV/AFP via Getty Images
Multiple news outlets dropped stunning reports Friday night on internal Facebook documents.
A consortium of news outlets has been going through thousands of documents provided by whistleblower Frances Haugen, and the first batch of reports Friday concern internal concerns at Facebook about how the company was handling the proliferation of misinformation about the 2020 election.
Before and after election day, and for weeks afterwards, then-President Donald Trump and some of his key allies made a number of false and conspiratorial claims about the 2020 election, culminating in the riots at the Capitol on January 6.
Haugen has claimed that Facebook “misled investors and the public about its role perpetuating misinformation and violent extremism relating to the 2020 election and January 6th insurrection.”
According to these documents, a Facebook employee sounded a warning on November 5 that “not only do we not do something about combustible election misinformation in comments, we amplify them and give them broader distribution.”
Additionally, the New York Times reports, one Facebook data scientist said “10 percent of all U.
The Washington Post reports that weeks after the 2020 election, Facebook rolled back some of the “unusually aggressive measures that had helped control toxic speech and misinformation on its platforms, although some others remained in place.”
Facebook has rejected criticisms that the website shares a fair amount of blame for not doing more before the violent riots at the Capitol.
Haugen apparently took pictures to “document… the company’s response” while the insurrection was underway,” CNN reports, and was taking pictures with her phone because she thought taking screenshots on internal company systems was riskier.
One of the documents she captured, titled “Capitol Protest BTG [Break the Glass] Response,” was a chart of measures Facebook could take in response to the January 6th attack. The chart appears to have been prepared beforehand; at the time Haugen photographed it, a little less than two hours after the Capitol was first breached, the company had instituted some of those measures while others were still under consideration. Among the potential actions listed in the chart were demoting “content deemed likely to violate our community standards in the areas of hate speech, graphic violence, and violence and incitement”…[A]ccording to the “Capitol Protest BTG response” document, the guardrails Facebook reimplemented on January 6th included reducing the visibility of posts likely to be reported and freezing
“commenting on posts in Groups that start to have a high rate of hate speech and violence & incitement comments,” among others.In the SEC disclosure, Haugen alleges that these levers were reinstated “only after the insurrection flared up.”
The documents also reveal how a Facebook researcher created a fake account in 2019 under the pseudonym “Carol Smith” to test exactly how Facebook was drawing people to misinformation. Per NBC News, it led them down a dark rabbit hole:
Though Smith had never expressed interest in conspiracy theories, in just two days Facebook was recommending she join groups dedicated to QAnon, a sprawling and baseless conspiracy theory and movement that claimed Trump was secretly saving the world from a cabal of pedophiles and Satanists.Smith didn’t follow the recommended QAnon groups, but whatever algorithm Facebook was using to determine how she should engage with the platform pushed ahead just the same. Within one week, Smith’s feed was full of groups and pages that had violated Facebook’s own rules, including those against hate speech and disinformation.
Facebook posted a response to all these reports from VP of Integrity Guy Rosen.
The statement insists Facebook knew 2020 would “be one of the most contentious” elections ever, and says they kept their strategy through January 20th because of the “high likelihood that the election results would be contested.”
Facebook points to their partnership with fact-checkers to label and remove
“To blame what happened on January 6 on how we implemented just one item of the above list is absurd,” Rosen says. “We are a significant social media platform so it’s only natural for content about major events like that to show up on Facebook. But responsibility for the insurrection itself falls squarely on the insurrectionists who broke the law and those who incited them.”
You can read the full reporting here from: the Washington Post, the New York Times, NBC, and CNN.