Facebook Papers: Documents reveal internal anger and opposition to the site's policies
Hours after the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, Mike Schroepfer, Facebook's chief technology officer , posted on the company's internal message board.
He wrote: "Everyone hang on." He added that Facebook should allow peaceful discussion of riots but not calls for violence.
His post was met with scathing responses from employees who blamed the company for what was happening.
“I struggle to match my values with my job here,” one employee wrote in a comment. (Employee's name has been redacted in a copy seen by NBC News.) "I came here hoping to make a difference and improve society, but all I saw was atrophy and a waiver of responsibility."
Another employee asked, "How can we expect to be ignored when leadership overrides research-based policy decisions to better serve people like the groups that incite violence today?"
The comments publicly challenged the company's leadership with an inaccurate message: Facebook's well- documented problems have not been fixed in inciting violent polarization and encouraging the spread of misinformation, despite the company's investments and promises.
Comments are in thousands of pages of internal Facebook documents submitted to NBC News detailing Facebook's internal discussions about the societal impact of its platforms. Together, the documents provide the deepest introduction to outsiders into the inner workings of the world's largest social media company.
It's a small part of internal communications over the past several years at Facebook , that employee message boards that began as a way to embrace transparency have become an outlet for reflection and advocacy on the impact of social media.
The documents show employees - many of whom are hired to help Facebook address problems on its platforms - discussing with each other on internal PR-free message boards. Many have tried to figure out how to turn the stalled bureaucratic wheels around and steer a company that now has so many divisions that employees are sometimes unaware of the overlapping responsibilities. Some employees defended management, with one describing Facebook executives as "brilliant data-driven futurists like many of us."
The documents were included in disclosures filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission , or SEC , and submitted to Congress in redacted form by legal counsel Francis Haugen, who served as Facebook's product manager until May and has filed as a whistleblower. Digital copies of the disclosures - with redactions of some names and other personal information - were obtained by a consortium of news organizations, including NBC News . Most documents are digital images of company materials on computer screens.
The news consortium is announcing at least some disclosures starting Monday. The Wall Street Journal reported some of the disclosures earlier.
Haugen claims in letters to the SEC office of the Whistleblower that Facebook executives and even CEO Mark Zuckerberg have misled investors for years, giving them a false picture of the reality within the company on topics such as Facebook's user base and human rights record . She wrote at least eight separate letters, and her attorneys submitted internal documents to the Securities and Exchange Commission to support her claims that the executives' statements did not match the truth. In the letters, she also offered to help the SEC if it would investigate potential violations of securities laws.
But more broadly, Haugen has started a discussion about Facebook's impact on society , both in the United States and abroad.
“Facebook didn't invent partisanship. They didn't invent polarization. They didn't invent racial violence,” Hogan said in a call with reporters this month. "But the thing I think we should discuss is what is the role and what choices did Facebook make to expose the public to greater risk than was necessary?"
Haugen reiterated her allegations against Facebook executives in her testimony before Congress this month.
"The company intentionally conceals vital information from the public, from the United States government, and from governments around the world," she told the Senate Consumer Protection Subcommittee on Commerce.
She is due to testify on Monday before the UK Parliament's Commission on Internet Security Examination .
Zuckerberg rejected Hogan's allegations. “The crux of these accusations is the idea that we prioritize profit over safety and well-being. This is not true,” Facebook said in another October 5. He also said that Facebook is being penalized for trying to study its impact on the world.
Facebook spokesperson Drew Pusateri defended the disclosures to investors, saying the company is confident it has provided investors with the information they need to make informed decisions.
“We make extensive disclosures in our SEC filings about the challenges we face, including user interaction, valuing duplicate and false accounts, and keeping our platform safe from people who want to use it to harm others,” he said in an email .
"All of these issues are well known and widely discussed in the industry, among academics, and in the media," he said. He said Facebook was ready to answer questions from regulators and would cooperate with government inquiries.
According to disclosures from Haugen:
The company spends significant time and resources studying how to solve such problems, but in some cases has refrained from implementing the potential solutions put forward by its researchers. Employees complain that sometimes it 's because Facebook's Washington-based policy team has veto power over decisions. Joel Kaplan, Facebook 's global head of public policy , has repeatedly defended his impact, saying he's pushing for analytical and methodological rigor around topics like the algorithms that power Facebook products .
In-house researchers wrote that a change to Facebook's News Feed in 2018 aimed at bringing friends and family members together in beneficial ways often had the opposite effect. Publications are spread more easily if they contain anger or misleading information, causing "" civil war through social Internet abroad in places such as Poland.
Engineers and statisticians struggle to understand why certain posts and not others attract re-shares on Facebook and how to fix "unhealthy side effects." In 2019, an internal researcher wrote: “We know that many of the things that generate interaction on our platform leave users divided and depressed.”
Facebook has struggled to filter out many posts that violate its rules. The documents show that the company's automated systems only removed about 2% of hate speech as of 2019, and as of this year, less than 1% of content that attempts to incite violence . Facebook said in a blog post this month that the documents reduce the company's effectiveness and that the prevalence of hate speech - the number of times users actually view it, rather than the number of posts - has decreased.
Several documents highlight Facebook's failure to monitor its platform outside the United States, including in Myanmar and Sri Lanka, where the company has issued an apology for its actions contributing to physical violence against religious or ethnic groups. The documents describe translation issues and a lack of local cultural knowledge.
It's not clear if the Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating Facebook or whether it will see enough material in the disclosures to warrant an investigation into whether the company could mislead investors. The Securities and Exchange Commission declined to comment. The Commission is not required to take any action on whistleblower advice, and when it conducts investigations, it does so on a confidential basis as a matter of policy. In an annual report, the Securities and Exchange Commission said it received more than 6,900 whistleblowers in the fiscal year ending in September 2020.
Many securities law experts said it would not be easy to prove wrongdoing.
“Regulators love clean cases, and they love where someone is on a tape doing something wrong,” said Joshua Metz, professor of securities law at Columbia University. He said Haugen's claims were not a "clean case".
Facebook opposition
Facebook's head of public relations said last week that Haugen's disclosures were a "campaign 'orchestrated'" at the direction of PR consultants.
"In no way can an orderly selection of Facebook's millions of documents be used to draw fair conclusions about us," Facebook's Vice President of Communications, Jon Bennett, said in a tweet ahead of the Haugen disclosures.
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