Requested by CNN about Sandberg’s quote and whether or not she stood by it, a Fb spokesperson pointed to the higher context round Sandberg’s quote. She had been noting that Jan. 6 group occurred largely on-line, together with however not restricted to on Fb’s platforms, the spokesperson stated.
Considered one of Haugen’s central allegations concerning the firm focuses on the assault on the Capitol. In a SEC disclosure she alleges, “Fb misled buyers and the general public about its function perpetuating misinformation and violent extremism regarding the 2020 election and January sixth rebel.”
Fb denies the premise of Haugen’s conclusions and says Haugen has cherry-picked paperwork to current an unfair portrayal of the corporate.
“The accountability for the violence that occurred on January 6 lies with those that attacked our Capitol and people who inspired them. We took steps to restrict content material that sought to delegitimize the election, together with labeling candidates’ posts with the most recent vote rely after Mr. Trump prematurely declared victory, pausing new political promoting and eradicating the unique #StopTheSteal Group in November,” Fb spokesperson Andy Stone instructed CNN Friday.
“After the violence on the Capitol erupted and as we noticed continued makes an attempt to arrange occasions to dispute the end result of the presidential election, we eliminated content material with the phrase ‘cease the steal’ below our Coordinating Hurt coverage and suspended Trump from our platform.”
“Our enforcement was piecemeal”
“Hindsight is 20:20,” the writer or authors of the evaluation, who are usually not identifiable from what was supplied, write. “[A]t the time it was very troublesome to know whether or not what we had been seeing was a coordinated effort to delegitimize the election, or whether or not it was protected free expression by customers who had been afraid and confused and deserved our empathy. However hindsight being 20:20 makes it all of the extra vital to look again to study what we are able to concerning the development of the election delegitimatizing actions that grew, unfold conspiracy, and helped incite the Capitol rebel.”
The evaluation discovered that the insurance policies and procedures Fb had in place had been merely lower than the duty of slowing, a lot much less halting, the “meteoric” development of Cease the Steal. As an illustration, these behind the evaluation famous that Fb handled each bit of content material and particular person or group inside Cease the Steal individually, slightly than as half of a complete, with dire outcomes.
“Virtually all the quickest rising FB Teams had been Cease the Steal throughout their peak development,” the evaluation says. “As a result of we had been every entity individually, slightly than as a cohesive motion, we had been solely in a position to take down particular person Teams and Pages as soon as they exceeded a violation threshold. We weren’t in a position to act on easy objects like posts and feedback as a result of they individually tended to not violate, even when they had been surrounded by hate, violence, and misinformation.”
This method did finally change, in line with the evaluation — after it was too late.
“After the Capitol rebel and a wave of Storm the Capitol occasions throughout the nation, we realized that the person delegitimizing Teams, Pages, and slogans did represent a cohesive motion,” the evaluation says.
This was not the one method during which Fb had didn’t anticipate one thing like Cease the Steal, or during which its response was missing.
Fb has for a while now had a coverage banning “coordinated inauthentic habits” on its platforms. This ban permits it to take motion towards, for example, the Russian troll military that labored to intrude with the 2016 US election by accounts and pages set as much as look as in the event that they had been American However, the evaluation notes with emphasis, the corporate had “little coverage round coordinated genuine hurt” — that’s, little to cease folks organizing below their actual names and never hiding their intention to get the nation to reject the outcomes of the election.
Cease the Steal and Patriot Occasion teams “weren’t immediately mobilizing offline hurt, nor had been they immediately selling militarization,” the evaluation says. “As an alternative, they had been amplifying and normalizing misinformation and violent hate in a method that delegitimized a free and truthful democratic election. The hurt existed on the community degree: a person’s speech is protected, however as a motion, it normalized delegitimization and hate in a method that resulted in offline hurt and hurt to the norms underpinning democracy.”
The evaluation does notice, nonetheless, that when Fb noticed the outcomes of Cease the Steal on January sixth and took motion, it was in a position to deploy measures that stymied the expansion of each Cease the Steal and Patriot Occasion teams.
Fb’s Stone instructed CNN, “Fb has taken extraordinary steps to handle dangerous content material and we’ll proceed to do our half. We additionally carefully labored with legislation enforcement, each earlier than January sixth and within the days and weeks since, with the aim of making certain that data linking the folks chargeable for January sixth to their crimes is accessible.”
Pulling levers
Haugen started gathering proof concerning the firm earlier than she finally left the tech big final Might. To cut back the prospect of getting caught taking screenshots of inner Fb programs, she used her cellphone to take images of her laptop display screen.
Because the rebel was underway in Washington and Fb was making an attempt to get a deal with on the state of affairs, Haugen was snapping footage, documenting the corporate’s response.
One of many paperwork she captured, titled “Capitol Protest BTG [Break the Glass] Response,” was a chart of measures Fb may soak up response to the January sixth assault. The chart seems to have been ready beforehand; on the time Haugen photographed it, rather less than two hours after the Capitol was first breached, the corporate had instituted a few of these measures whereas others had been nonetheless into consideration. Among the many potential actions listed within the chart had been demoting “content material deemed more likely to violate our group requirements within the areas of hate speech, graphic violence, and violence and incitement.”
The web page labeled these as “US2020 Levers, beforehand rolled again.”
These “levers,” as Fb refers to them, are measures — guardrails — that the corporate put in place earlier than final 12 months’s Presidential election in an try and gradual the unfold of hate and misinformation on the platform. Fb has not been clear in its public statements about what measures it did roll again after the election and why it did so at a time of tumult when the sitting president was calling the outcomes of the vote into query.
However in line with the “Capitol Protest BTG response” doc, the guardrails Fb reimplemented on January sixth included lowering the visibility of posts more likely to be reported and freezing “commenting on posts in Teams that begin to have a excessive fee of hate speech and violence & incitement feedback,” amongst others.
Within the SEC disclosure, Haugen alleges that these levers had been reinstated “solely after the rebel flared up.”
Requested concerning the selections to dial the levers again after which push them out once more, Stone stated, “In phasing in after which adjusting extra measures earlier than, throughout and after the election, we took under consideration particular on-platforms alerts and knowledge from our ongoing, common engagement with legislation enforcement. When these alerts modified, so did the measures.”
A by line
When Fb executives posted messages publicly and internally condemning the riot, some staff pushed again, even suggesting Fb might need had some culpability.
“There have been dozens of Cease the Steal teams energetic up till yesterday, and I doubt they minced phrases about their intentions,” one worker wrote in response to a submit from Mike Schroepfer, Fb’s chief know-how officer.3
One other wrote, “All due respect, however have not we had sufficient time to determine the right way to handle discourse with out enabling violence? We have been fueling this fireplace for a very long time and we should not be shocked it is now uncontrolled.”
Different Fb staff went additional, claiming selections by firm management over time had helped create the situations that paved the best way for an assault on the US Capitol.
Responding to Schroepfer’s submit, one staffer wrote that, “management overrides analysis based mostly coverage selections to raised serve folks just like the teams inciting violence at this time. Rank and file staff have accomplished their half to establish adjustments to enhance our platforms however have been actively held again.”
One other staffer, referencing years of controversial and questionable decision-making by Fb management round political speech concluded, “historical past won’t choose us kindly.”
