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In 2021, an internal
document leak A news leak is the unsanctioned release of confidential information to news media. It can also be the premature publication of information by a news outlet, of information that it has agreed not to release before a specified time, in violation of ...
from the company then known as Facebook (now
Meta Platforms Meta Platforms, Inc., (file no. 3835815) trade name, doing business as Meta and formerly named Facebook, Inc., and TheFacebook, Inc., is an American multinational technology conglomerate based in Menlo Park, California. The company owns Facebo ...
, or Meta) showed it was aware of harmful societal effects from its platforms. The leak, released by
whistleblower A whistleblower (also written as whistle-blower or whistle blower) is a person, often an employee, who reveals information about activity within a private or public organization that is deemed illegal, immoral, illicit, unsafe or fraudulent. Whi ...
Frances Haugen, resulted in reporting from ''
The Wall Street Journal ''The Wall Street Journal'' is an American business-focused, international daily newspaper based in New York City, with international editions also available in Chinese and Japanese. The ''Journal'', along with its Asian editions, is published ...
'' in September, as ''The Facebook Files'' series, as well as the ''Facebook Papers'', by a consortium of news outlets the next month. Primarily, the reports proved that based on internally commissioned studies, the company was fully aware of negative impact on teenage users of
Instagram Instagram is a photo and video sharing social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. The app allows users to upload media that can be edited with filters and organized by hashtags and geographical tagging. Posts can ...
, and the contribution of
Facebook Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin M ...
activity to violence in developing countries. Other takeaways of the leak include the impact of the company's platforms on spreading false information, and promoting anger-provoking posts.


Background

In mid September 2021, ''The Wall Street Journal'' began publishing articles on Facebook based on internal documents from unknown provenance. Revelations included reporting of special allowances on posts from high-profile users ("XCheck"), subdued responses to flagged information on human traffickers and drug cartels, a shareholder lawsuit concerning the cost of Facebook (now Meta) CEO
Mark Zuckerberg Mark Elliot Zuckerberg (; born ) is an American business magnate, internet entrepreneur, and philanthropist. He is known for co-founding the social media website Facebook and its parent company Meta Platforms (formerly Facebook, Inc.), o ...
's personal liability protection in resolving the
Cambridge Analytica data scandal Cambridge ( ) is a university city and the county town in Cambridgeshire, England. It is located on the River Cam approximately north of London. As of the 2021 United Kingdom census, the population of Cambridge was 145,700. Cambridge became ...
, an initiative to increase pro-Facebook news within user news feeds, and internal knowledge of how Instagram exacerbated negative self-image in surveyed teenage girls.
Siva Vaidhyanathan Siva Vaidhyanathan (born 1966) is a cultural historian and media scholar, and the Robertson professor of Media Studies at the University of Virginia. Vaidhyanathan is a permanent columnist at The Guardian and Slate; he is also a frequent contribut ...
writes for ''
The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers ''The Observer'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the Gu ...
'' that the documents are from a team at Facebook "devoted to social science and data analytics that is supposed to help the company's leaders understand the consequences of their policies and technological designs." Casey Newton of ''
The Verge ''The Verge'' is an American technology news website operated by Vox Media, publishing news, feature stories, guidebooks, product reviews, consumer electronics news, and podcasts. The website launched on November 1, 2011, and uses Vox Media' ...
'' wrote that it is the company's biggest challenge since its
Cambridge Analytica data scandal Cambridge ( ) is a university city and the county town in Cambridgeshire, England. It is located on the River Cam approximately north of London. As of the 2021 United Kingdom census, the population of Cambridge was 145,700. Cambridge became ...
. The leaked documents include internal research from Facebook that studied the impact of Instagram on teenage mental health. Although Facebook earlier claimed that its rules applies equally to everyone on the platform, internal documents shared with ''
The Wall Street Journal ''The Wall Street Journal'' is an American business-focused, international daily newspaper based in New York City, with international editions also available in Chinese and Japanese. The ''Journal'', along with its Asian editions, is published ...
'' point to special policy exceptions reserved for VIP users, including celebrities and politicians. After this reporting, Facebook's oversight board said it would review the system. The former Facebook employee behind the leak, Frances Haugen, revealed her identity on ''
60 Minutes ''60 Minutes'' is an American television news magazine broadcast on the CBS television network. Debuting in 1968, the program was created by Don Hewitt and Bill Leonard, who chose to set it apart from other news programs by using a unique styl ...
'' on October 3, 2021.


The reports

Beginning October 22, a group of news outlets began publishing articles based on documents provided by Haugen's lawyers, collectively referred to as ''The Facebook Papers''.


Instagram's harmful effects on teenagers

The Files show that Facebook (now Meta) has been conducting internal research of how Instagram affects young users for the past three years. While the findings point to Instagram being harmful to a large portion of young users, teenage girls were among the most harmed. Researchers within the company reported that "we make body issues worse for one in three teenage girls". Furthermore, internal research revealed that teen boys were also affected by negative social comparison, citing 14% of boys in the US in 2019. Instagram was concluded to contribute to problems more specific to its app use, such as social comparison among teens.


Violence in developing countries

An internal memo seen by the ''
Washington Post ''The Washington Post'' (also known as the ''Post'' and, informally, ''WaPo'') is an American daily newspaper published in Washington, D.C. It is the most widely circulated newspaper within the Washington metropolitan area and has a large nati ...
'' reveal that Facebook has been aware of
hate speech Hate speech is defined by the ''Cambridge Dictionary'' as "public speech that expresses hate or encourages violence towards a person or group based on something such as race, religion, sex, or sexual orientation". Hate speech is "usually thoug ...
and calls for violence against groups like Muslims and
Kashmiri Kashmiri may refer to: * People or things related to the Kashmir Valley or the broader region of Kashmir * Kashmiris, an ethnic group native to the Kashmir Valley * Kashmiri language, their language People with the name * Kashmiri Saikia Baruah ...
s, including posts of photos of piles of dead Kashmiri bodies with glorifying captions on its platform in India. Still, none of their publishers were blocked. Documents reveal Facebook has responded to these incidents by removing posts which violate their policy, but hasn't made any substantial efforts to prevent repeat offenses. As 90% of monthly Facebook users are now located outside of the US and Canada, Facebook claims language barriers are one obstacle that is preventing widespread reform.


Controlling falsehoods about the U.S. elections

''The New York Times'' points internal discussions where employees raised that Facebook was spreading content about the QAnon conspiracy theory more than a year before the
2020 United States elections The 2020 United States elections were held on Tuesday, November 3, 2020. Democratic presidential nominee, former vice president Joe Biden, defeated incumbent Republican president Donald Trump in the presidential election. Despite losing seats ...
. After the election, a data scientist mentioned in an internal note that 10 percent of all U.S. views of political content were of posts alleging that the election was fraudulent.


Promoting anger-provoking posts

In 2015, in addition to the Like button on posts, Facebook introduced a set of other emotional reaction options: love, haha, yay, wow, sad and angry. The Washington Post reported that for three years, Facebook's algorithms promoted posts that received the 'angry' reaction from its users, based on internal analysis showing that such posts lead to five times more engagement than posts with regular likes. Years later, Facebook's researchers pointed out that posts with 'angry' reactions were much more likely to be toxic, polarizing, fake or low quality. In 2018, Facebook overhauled its News Feed algorithm, implementing a new algorithm which favored "Meaningful Social Interations" or "MSI". The new algorithm increased the weight of reshared material - a move which aimed to "reverse the decline in comments and encourage more original posting". While the algorithm was successful in its efforts, consequences such as user reports of feed quality decreasing along with increased anger on the site were observed. Leaked documents reveal that employees presented several potential changes to fix some of the highlighted issues with their algorithm. However, documents claim
Mark Zuckerberg Mark Elliot Zuckerberg (; born ) is an American business magnate, internet entrepreneur, and philanthropist. He is known for co-founding the social media website Facebook and its parent company Meta Platforms (formerly Facebook, Inc.), o ...
denied the proposed changes due to his worry that they might cause less users to engage with Facebook. Documents have also pointed to another 2019 study conducted by Facebook where a fake account based in India was created and studied to see what type of content it was presented and interacted with. Results of the study showed that within three weeks, the fake account's newsfeed was being presented pornography and "filled with polarizing and graphic content, hate speech and misinformation", according to an internal company report.


Employee dissatisfaction

''Politico'' quotes several Facebook staff expressing concerns about the company's willingness and ability to respond to damages caused by the platform. A 2020 post reads: "It’s not normal for a large number of people in the 'make the site safe' team to leave saying, 'hey, we're actively making the world worse FYI.' Every time this gets raised it gets shrugged off with 'hey people change jobs all the time' but this is NOT normal."


Apple's threat to remove Facebook and Instagram

In 2019, following concerns about Facebook and Instagram being used to trade maids in the Middle East, Apple threatened to remove their iOS apps from the App Store.


XCheck

The documents have shown a private program known as "XCheck" or "cross-check" that Facebook has employed in order to whitelist posts from users deemed as "high-profile". The system began as a quality control measure but has since grown to protect "millions of VIP users from the company's normal enforcement process". XCheck has led to celebrities and other public figures being exempt from punishment that the average Facebook user would receive from violating policies. In 2019, football player Neymar had posted nude photos of a woman who had accused him of rape which were left up for more than a day. According to
The Wall Street Journal ''The Wall Street Journal'' is an American business-focused, international daily newspaper based in New York City, with international editions also available in Chinese and Japanese. The ''Journal'', along with its Asian editions, is published ...
, "XCheck grew to include at least 5.8 million users in 2020" according to Facebook's internal documents. The goal of XCheck was "to never publicly tangle with anyone who is influential enough to do you harm".


Collaboration on censorship with the government of Vietnam

In 2020, Vietnam's communist government has threatened to shut down Facebook if the social media company doesn't co-operate on censoring political content in the country, Meta's (then known as Facebook) biggest market in the region. The decision to comply was personally approved by Mark Zuckerberg.


Suppression of harmful political movements on its platform

In 2021, Facebook developed a new strategy for addressing harmful content on their site, implement measures which were designed to reduce and suppress the spread of movements that were deemed hateful. According to a senior security official at Facebook, the company "would seek to disrupt on-platform movements only if there was compelling evidence that they were the product of tightly knit circles of users connected to real-world violence or other harm and committed to violating Facebook’s rules". As part of their recently coordinated initiative, this included less promotion of the movement's posts within users' News Feed as well as not notifying users of new posts from these pages. Specific groups that have been highlighted as being affected by Facebook's social harm policy include the Patriot Party, previously linked to the Capitol attack, as well as a newer German conspiracy group known as Querdenken, who had been placed under surveillance by German intelligence after protests it organized repeatedly “resulted in violence and injuries to the police”.


Facebook's AI concern

According to the Wall Street Journal, documents show that in 2019, Facebook reduced the time spent by human reviewers on hate-speech complaints, shifting towards a stronger dependence on their artificial intelligence systems regulate the matter. However, internal documents from employees claim that their AI has been largely unsuccessful, seeing trouble detecting videos of cars crashing, cockfighting, as well as understanding hate-speech in foreign languages. Internal engineers and researchers within Facebook have estimated that their AI has only been able to detect and remove 0.6% of "all content that violated Facebook’s policies against violence and incitement".


''The Wall Street Journal'' podcast

For ''The Facebook Files'' series of reports, ''The Wall Street Journal'' produced a podcast on its ''The Journal'' channel, divided into eight episodes: * Part 1: The Whitelist * Part 2: 'We Make Body Image Issues Worse' * Part 3: 'This Shouldn't Happen on Facebook' * Part 4: The Outrage Algorithm * Part 5: The Push To Attract Younger Users * Part 6: The Whistleblower * Part 7: The AI Challenge * Part 8: A New Enforcement Strategy


Facebook's response

In the Q3 2021
earnings call An earnings call is a teleconference, or webcast, in which a public company discusses the financial results of a reporting period ("earnings guidance"). The name comes from earnings per share (EPS), the bottom line number in the income statement div ...
, Facebook CEO
Mark Zuckerberg Mark Elliot Zuckerberg (; born ) is an American business magnate, internet entrepreneur, and philanthropist. He is known for co-founding the social media website Facebook and its parent company Meta Platforms (formerly Facebook, Inc.), o ...
discussed the recent leaks, characterizing them as coordinated efforts to paint a false picture of his company by selectively leaking documents. According to a leaked internal email seen by ''
The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...
'', Facebook asked its employees to “preserve internal documents and communications since 2016”, a practice called a
legal hold A legal hold is a process that an organization uses to preserve all forms of potentially relevant information when litigation is pending or reasonably anticipated. The legal hold is initiated by a notice or communication from legal counsel to an ...
. The email continues: “As is often the case following this kind of reporting, a number of inquiries from governments and legislative bodies have been launched into the company’s operations.”


Lobbying

In December 2021, news broke on The Wall Street Journal pointing to Meta's lobbying efforts to divide US lawmakers and "muddy the waters" in Congress, to hinder regulation following the 2021 whistleblower leaks. Facebook's lobbyst team in Washington suggested to Republican lawmakers that the whisteblower "was trying to help Democrats," while the narrative told to Democratic staffers was that Republicans "were focused on the company's decision to ban expressions of support for Kyle Rittenhouse," The Wall Street Journal reported. According to the article, the company's goal was to "muddy the waters, divide lawmakers along partisan lines and forestall a cross-party alliance" against Facebook (now Meta) in Congress.


See also

*
Criticism of Facebook Facebook (and parent company Meta Platforms) has been the subject of criticism and legal action. Criticisms include the outsize influence Facebook has on the lives and health of its users and employees, as well as Facebook's influence on the wa ...
*
Comparison of user features of messaging platforms Comparison of user features of messaging platforms refers to a comparison of all the various user features of various electronic instant messaging platforms. This includes a wide variety of resources; it includes standalone apps, platforms within we ...
* Instagram's impact on people *
Problematic social media use Relationships between digital media use and mental health have been considerably researched, debated, and discussed among experts in several disciplines. Research suggests that mental health issues arising from social media use affect women more ...


References


Further reading


A whistleblower’s power: Key takeaways from the Facebook Papers
(WaPo, October 25, 2021)

(NYT, October 25, 2021)
‘HISTORY WILL NOT JUDGE US KINDLY’
(Adrienne LaFrance, Atlantic, October 25, 2021)
The Facebook Papers: Documents reveal internal fury and dissent over site’s policies
(NBC News, October 25, 2021)

(CNN, October 24, 2021) * ttps://www.politico.com/news/2021/10/25/facebook-market-dominance-whistleblower-516918 Facebook documents offer a treasure trove for Washington’s antitrust war(Politico, October 25, 2021)
Here are all the Facebook Papers stories
(Protocol) * * * * *


External links

* (''The Facebook Files'', ''
The Wall Street Journal ''The Wall Street Journal'' is an American business-focused, international daily newspaper based in New York City, with international editions also available in Chinese and Japanese. The ''Journal'', along with its Asian editions, is published ...
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