In 2021, an internal document leak from the company then known as Facebook (now

Meta Platforms Meta Platforms, Inc. is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Menlo Park, California. Meta owns and operates several prominent social media platforms and communication services, including Facebook, Instagram, Threads ...

, or Meta) showed it was aware of harmful societal effects from its platforms, yet persisted in prioritizing profit over addressing these harms. The leak, released by

whistleblower Whistleblowing (also whistle-blowing or whistle blowing) is the activity of a person, often an employee, revealing information about activity within a private or public organization that is deemed illegal, immoral, illicit, unsafe, unethical or ...

Frances Haugen, resulted in reporting from ''

The Wall Street Journal ''The Wall Street Journal'' (''WSJ''), also referred to simply as the ''Journal,'' is an American newspaper based in New York City. The newspaper provides extensive coverage of news, especially business and finance. It operates on a subscriptio ...

'' 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 revealed that, based on internally-commissioned studies, the company was fully aware of negative impacts on teenage users of

Instagram Instagram is an American photo sharing, photo and Short-form content, short-form video sharing social networking service owned by Meta Platforms. It allows users to upload media that can be edited with Social media camera filter, filters, be ...

, and the contribution of

Facebook Facebook is a social media and social networking service owned by the American technology conglomerate Meta Platforms, Meta. Created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with four other Harvard College students and roommates, Eduardo Saverin, Andre ...

activity to violence in developing countries. Other takeaways of the leak include the impact of the company's platforms on spreading false information, and Facebook's policy of promoting inflammatory posts. Furthermore, Facebook was fully aware that harmful content was being pushed through Facebook algorithms reaching young users. The types of content included posts promoting

anorexia nervosa Anorexia nervosa (AN), often referred to simply as anorexia, is an eating disorder characterized by Calorie restriction, food restriction, body image disturbance, fear of gaining weight, and an overpowering desire to be thin. Individuals wit ...

and

self-harm Self-harm refers to intentional behaviors that cause harm to oneself. This is most commonly regarded as direct injury of one's own skin tissues, usually without suicidal intention. Other terms such as cutting, self-abuse, self-injury, and s ...

photos. In October 2021,

Whistleblower Aid Whistleblower Aid is a nonprofit legal assistance organization co-founded by John Tye (whistleblower), John Tye and Mark Zaid to help whistleblowers in government and the private sector. It provides free legal services as well as support and securi ...

filed eight anonymous

complaints with the

U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission The United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is an independent agency of the United States federal government, created in the aftermath of the Wall Street crash of 1929. Its primary purpose is to enforce laws against market m ...

(SEC) on behalf of Haugen alleging

securities fraud Securities fraud, also known as stock fraud and investment fraud, is a deceptive practice in the stock or commodities markets that induces investors to make purchase or sale decisions on the basis of false information. After publicly revealing 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 distinguished it from other news programs by using a unique style o ...

'', Haugen testified before the U.S. Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety, and Data Security about the content of the leaked documents and the complaints. After the company renamed itself as Meta Platforms, Whistleblower Aid filed two additional securities fraud complaints with the SEC against the company on behalf of Haugen in February 2022.

Background

In mid September 2021, ''

'' 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 cartel A drug cartel is a criminal organization composed of independent drug lords who collude with each other in order to improve their profits and dominate the illegal drug trade. Drug cartels form with the purpose of controlling the supply of the i ...

s, a shareholder lawsuit concerning the cost of Facebook (now Meta) CEO

Mark Zuckerberg Mark Elliot Zuckerberg (; born May 14, 1984) is an American businessman who co-founded the social media service Facebook and its parent company Meta Platforms, of which he is the chairman, chief executive officer, and controlling sharehold ...

's personal liability protection in resolving the Cambridge Analytica data scandal, an initiative to increase pro-Facebook news within user news feeds, and internal knowledge of how

exacerbated negative self-image in surveyed teenage girls.

Siva Vaidhyanathan Siva Vaidhyanathan (born 1966) is an American 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 frequen ...

wrote for ''

The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in Manchester in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'' and changed its name in 1959, followed by a move to London. Along with its sister paper, ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardi ...

'' that the documents were 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 journalism, technology news website headquarters, headquartered in Lower Manhattan, New York City and operated by Vox Media. The website publishes news, feature stories, guidebooks, product reviews, cons ...

'' wrote that it is the company's biggest challenge since its Cambridge Analytica data scandal. The leaked documents include internal research from Facebook that studied the impact of Instagram on teenage mental health. Although Facebook claimed earlier that its rules applies equally to everyone on the platform, internal documents shared with ''The Wall Street Journal'' 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. On October 3, 2021, the former Facebook employee behind the leak, Frances Haugen, revealed her identity on ''

''.

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''.

2020 U.S. elections and January 6 U.S. Capitol attack

''The New York Times'' pointed to internal discussions where employees raised concerns that Facebook was spreading content about the

QAnon QAnon ( ) is a far-right conspiracy theories in United States politics, American political conspiracy theory and political movement that originated in 2017. QAnon centers on fabricated claims made by an anonymous individual or individuals kno ...

conspiracy theory more than a year before the

2020 United States elections Elections in the United States, Elections were held in the United States on November 3, 2020. The Democratic Party (United States), Democratic Party's nominee, former Vice presidents of the United States, vice president Joe Biden, defeated incu ...

. 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. Among the ten anonymous whistleblower complaints Whistleblower Aid filed with the SEC on behalf of Haugen, one complaint alleged that Facebook misled the company's investors and the general public about its role in perpetuating misinformation related to the 2020 elections and political extremism that caused the

January 6 United States Capitol attack On January 6, 2021, the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C., was attacked by a mob of supporters of Donald Trump, President Donald Trump in an attempted self-coup,Multiple sources: * * * * * * * * * * * * * two months afte ...

. Haugen was employed at Facebook from June 2019 until May 2021, starting within the company's Civic Integrity Team that was focused on investigating and addressing worldwide elections issues on the platform, as well as how the platform could be used to spread political

disinformation Disinformation is misleading content deliberately spread to deceive people, or to secure economic or political gain and which may cause public harm. Disinformation is an orchestrated adversarial activity in which actors employ strategic dece ...

and

misinformation Misinformation is incorrect or misleading information. Misinformation and disinformation are not interchangeable terms: misinformation can exist with or without specific malicious intent, whereas disinformation is distinct in that the information ...

, to incite violence, and be abused by malicious governments until the company dissolved the team in December 2020. In the weeks after the 2020 U.S. presidential election, Facebook began rolling back many content policy enforcement measures it had in place during the election despite internal company tracking data showing a rise in policy-violating content on the platform, while Donald Trump's Facebook account had been

whitelist A whitelist or allowlist is a list or register of entities that are being provided a particular privilege, service, mobility, access or recognition. Entities on the list will be accepted, approved and/or recognized. Whitelisting is the reverse of ...

ed in the company's XCheck program. Another of the whistleblower complaints Haugen filed with the SEC alleged that the company misled investors and the general public about enforcement of its terms of service due to such whitelisting under the XCheck program. Haugen was interviewed by videoconference by the U.S. House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack in November 2021 about her tenure at Facebook, the company documents she provided to Congress, the company's corporate structure, and her testimony before Congress the previous month, but none of the information she provided to the Committee was included in its final report.

Instagram's effects on teenagers

The Files show that Facebook (now Meta) had been conducting internal research of how Instagram affects young users since 2018. 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. Facebook published some of its internal research on September 29, 2021, saying these reports mischaracterized the purpose and results of its research.

Studying of preteens

The Files show that Facebook formed a team to study preteens, set a three year goal to create more products for this demographic, and commissioned strategy papers about the long-term business prospects of attracting the preteen demographic. A 2020 document from Facebook states: "Why do we care about tweens?" and answers that question by saying that "They are a valuable but untapped audience."

Violence in developing countries

An internal memo seen by ''

The Washington Post ''The Washington Post'', locally known as ''The'' ''Post'' and, informally, ''WaPo'' or ''WP'', is an American daily newspaper published in Washington, D.C., the national capital. It is the most widely circulated newspaper in the Washington m ...

'' revealed that Facebook has been aware of

hate speech Hate speech is a term with varied meaning and has no single, consistent definition. It 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 ...

and calls for violence against groups like Muslims and Kashmiris, 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 has not 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.

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 receiving the new reactions (including the 'angry' reaction) from its users; giving them a score five times that of traditional 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. Ignoring frequent internal calls, the company did not differentiate the 'angry' reaction from other reactions until September 2019, when its value was cut to zero (only after realizing users' dissatisfaction over their posts receiving angry reactions). There have been other cases when Facebook prioritized new features it wanted to promote, despite this turning out to be promoting toxic or radicalizing material. 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

denied the proposed changes due to his worry that they might cause fewer 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 damage 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 Neymar da Silva Santos Júnior (; born 5 February 1992), also known as Neymar Júnior or simply Neymar, is a Brazilian professional Association football, footballer who plays as a left winger, attacking midfielder or Forward (association foo ...

had posted nude photos of a woman who had accused him of rape which were left up for more than a day. According to ''

'', "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 threatened to shut down Facebook if the social media company did not cooperate on censoring political content in the country, Meta's (then known as Facebook) big market in

Southeast Asia Southeast Asia is the geographical United Nations geoscheme for Asia#South-eastern Asia, southeastern region of Asia, consisting of the regions that are situated south of China, east of the Indian subcontinent, and northwest of the Mainland Au ...

. The decision to comply was personally approved by Mark Zuckerberg.

Suppression of political movements on its platform

In 2021, Facebook developed a new strategy for addressing harmful content on their site, implementing 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 to regulate the matter. However, internal documents from employees claim that their AI has been largely unsuccessful, seeing trouble detecting videos of cars crashing,

cockfighting Cockfighting is a blood sport involving domesticated roosters as the combatants. The first documented use of the word gamecock, denoting use of the cock as to a "game", a sport, pastime or entertainment, was recorded in 1634, after the term ...

, 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".

Inclusion of ''Breitbart News'' as trusted news source

''The Wall Street Journal'' reported that Facebook executives resisted removing the

far-right Far-right politics, often termed right-wing extremism, encompasses a range of ideologies that are marked by ultraconservatism, authoritarianism, ultranationalism, and nativism. This political spectrum situates itself on the far end of the ...

website ''

Breitbart News ''Breitbart News Network'' (; known commonly as ''Breitbart News'', ''Breitbart'', or ''Breitbart.com'') is an Radical right (United States), American far-rightMultiple sources: * * * * * * * * * * * * syndicated news, opinion, and commentar ...

'' from Facebook's News Tab feature to avoid angering

Donald Trump Donald John Trump (born June 14, 1946) is an American politician, media personality, and businessman who is the 47th president of the United States. A member of the Republican Party (United States), Republican Party, he served as the 45 ...

and Republican members of Congress, despite criticism from Facebook employees. An August 2019 internal Facebook study had found that ''Breitbart News'' was the least trusted news source, and also ranked as low-quality, in the sources it looked at across the U.S. and Great Britain.

''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 its financial results for a reporting period, often providing earnings guidance for future performance. The term stems from earnings per share (EPS), calculated ...

, Facebook CEO

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'' (''NYT'') is an American daily newspaper based in New York City. ''The New York Times'' covers domestic, national, and international news, and publishes opinion pieces, investigative reports, and reviews. As one of ...

'', 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. It is often issued when an organization receives a request for production in pendi ...

. 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 lobbyist team in Washington suggested to Republican lawmakers that the whistleblower "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 Kyle Howard Rittenhouse (born January 3, 2003) is an American man who gained national attention at age 17 for shooting three men in Kenosha, Wisconsin, two fatally, in August 2020, amid protests following the police shooting of Jacob Blake. He ...

," ''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.

References

External links

* (''The Facebook Files'', ''

'') * * * {{January 6 United States Capitol attack navbox News leaks Facebook criticisms and controversies Corporate scandals 2021 scandals