Mike Schroepfer arrived at the Capitol hours after the January 6 attack. FacebookThe company’s chief tech officer posted the message on its internal messaging board.

He said, “Hang on everyone!” He added that Facebook should be able to allow peaceful discussion about the riot, but not call for violence. 

The employees responded harshly to the post and blasted the company. 

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An employee commented that “I am struggling to align my values with my job here.” (NBC News saw the comment, but it was not revealed who the employee was. “I arrived here in hopes of affecting change and improving society. However, all I have seen is atrophy. 

A colleague asked “How do we expect to ignore leaders who override research-based policies to better serve people like those inciting violence?”  

With a subtle message, the comments openly challenged Facebook’s leadership. well-documented problems in abetting violent polarization and encouraging the spread of misinformation weren’t getting fixed, despite the company’s investments and promises. 

These comments can be found on thousands of pages in internal Facebook documents that NBC News received detailing Facebook’s internal discussions about the societal impacts of its platforms. These documents provide an inside look at what goes on within the largest social media company in the world. 

They represent a tiny fraction of Facebook’s internal communications in the past few years. Message boards created by employees as a means to encourage transparency and reflection have been transformed into a forum for advocacy and advocacy about the social media impact.

The documents show employees — many who were hired to help Facebook address problems on its platforms — debating with one another on internal message boards free of public relations spin. Many attempted to find a way to steer the company with so many departments, that sometimes employees don’t know their overlaps of responsibility. Some employees supported management. One called Facebook executives “brilliant and data-driven futurists, like many others.” 

Documents were disclosed to the Securities and Exchange Commission or SEC. They were also provided by Frances Haugen’s legal counsel in redacted format to Congress. Frances Haugen was a Facebook product manager from May to May and is now a whistleblower. Digital versions of the disclosures — with some names and other personal information redacted — were obtained by a consortium of news organizations, including NBC News. Many of these documents include digital images of company material displayed on computer screens. 

Starting Monday, the news consortium will make at least some of these disclosures publicly. The Wall Street Journal reported some of the disclosures earlier. 

Haugen claims in letters to the SEC Office of the Whistleblower, that Facebook executives including CEO Mark Zuckerberg misled investors over the years. This gave them an inaccurate picture of the truth inside the company on subjects such as Facebook’s user base and its record on human rights. To support her assertion that statements made by executives are false, she sent at least 8 letters. She also gave the SEC internal documents from her lawyers. She also suggested that she would help the SEC in investigating potential securities law violations. 

Haugen also started a conversation about Facebook and its impact on society both here in America as well as abroad. 

Facebook didn’t invent partisanship. They didn’t create polarization. In a telephone call this month with reporters, Haugen explained that ethnic violence was not invented by them. “But, the important thing we should discuss is the role and the choices that Facebook made to make the public more vulnerable than it was necessary. 

Haugen repeated the accusation of Facebook executives in testimony before Congress this month. 

The senator stated that the company “intentionally hides vital data from the public, the U.S. government, and other governments around the world,” to the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Consumer Protection. 

She is scheduled to testify Monday before a committee of the U.K. Parliament examining online safety. 

Zuckerberg has responded to Haugen’s accusations. These accusations are rooted in the idea that profit is more important than safety and well-being. He said that it was “just not true” in a Facebook post. post Oct. 5. Oct. 

Drew Pusateri, a spokesperson for Facebook, said that the company had made disclosures to shareholders and is confident it gave investors all the necessary information to make informed choices. 

He stated in an email that “We make extensive disclosures to our SEC filings regarding the challenges we face”, including user engagement and estimating duplicate or false accounts and keeping our platform secure from those who would like to harm it.” 

He stated that “all of these issues were well known” and are being discussed extensively within the industry and among academics. He said that Facebook was ready to respond to regulators’ inquiries and would cooperate with any government inquiry.  

The disclosures by Haugen are: 

• Although the company invests a significant amount of resources and time studying solutions to such problems, in certain cases it has declined to implement possible solutions presented by its own research. Sometimes, employees claim that Facebook’s Washington policy team holds the veto over their decisions. Joel Kaplan has been named Facebook’s Global Head of Public Policy. repeatedly defended his influence, saying he pushes for analytical and methodological rigor about subjects such as the algorithms that power Facebook products. 
• Internal researchers found that Facebook’s 2018 news feed changes meant to connect friends and families in meaningful ways, often led to the reverse effect. Outraged or misleading posts spread quicker, leading to an “online civil war” that has now been started in Poland. 
• Statisticians and engineers struggle to explain why some posts get more traction on Facebook through reshares. They also need to know how to correct the “unhealthy side effect”. A 2019 internal researcher said: “We know there are many things that drive engagement on Facebook that leave users depressed and divided.” 
• Facebook is having trouble filtering out posts that are not in compliance with its guidelines. The company deleted about 21% of hate speech by 2019, according to records. And, the automated systems did not delete more than 1% of violence-inducing content as of 2019. Facebook stated in a blog post this month that the documents understate the company’s effectiveness and that the prevalence of hate speech — how often users actually view it, rather than the number of posts — has dropped. 
• Many documents point out that Facebook failed to monitor its platforms outside the U.S. including Myanmar and Sri Lanka where it has been operating. issued apologies for its actions contributing to physical violence against religious or ethnic groups. These documents discuss translation problems and lack of cultural knowledge. 

Facebook is not clear if the SEC is currently investigating it. It also isn’t known if the SEC would find enough information in these disclosures for them to investigate whether or not the company may have misled investors. SEC refused to comment. Although whistleblower tips are not required for the SEC to investigate, when investigating, they do so confidentially. policy An annual reportAccording to the SEC, it had received 6,900 tips from whistleblowers in its fiscal year that ended September 2020. 

Many securities lawyers said that it would be difficult to prove wrongdoing. 

“Regulators enjoy clean cases. They like when someone is taped doing something wrong.” Joshua MittsColumbia University securities law professor. He said that Haugen’s claims are not a clean case. 

Reactions from Facebook

Last week, Facebook’s chief of public relations stated that Haugen’s revelations were part of an “orchestrated gotcha” campaign led by her public relation advisers. 

John Pinette, Facebook’s vice president of communications, stated in an a: “A carefully curated selection of millions of documents can never be used in any way to draw fair conclusions regarding us.” tweet ahead of the release of the Haugen disclosures. 

We share our work in progress internally and discuss options. Pinette explained that not all suggestions can withstand the scrutiny needed to ensure decisions affect many people. 

Haugen has received the support of public relations consultants and experienced lawyers. Bill Burton, the Obama White House spokesperson is running the company. Haugen is represented in media by Whistleblower Aid’s lawyers. 

Haugen’s lawyers have made disclosures that illustrate the roiling internal Facebook debate while at the same moment it is in an external spotlight with harsh congressional hearings. Privacy investigations and antitrust lawsuits are just some of the many scrutiny from outsiders. 

This disruption could be more dangerous than any outside scrutiny. Facebook’s success is dependent on the ability to retain and attract top-notch technologists and software engineers around the globe. It could be losing its competitiveness if it can’t retain, motivate, and attract talented workers, the company stated in its latest report. annual report in January. 

On Jan. 6, a Facebook employee posted on an internal messageboard: “We’ve been struggling with questions that we don’t get answers from family and friends for many years.” Particularly, Recruiting has become more challenging over time as Facebook’s ethics reputation continues to decline (all the while our technical reputation increases). 

Facebook stated in a statement, that 83% of employees would recommend the company as a good place to work. It also said that this year it had hired more people than ever before. 

Jan. 6 Impact

Schroepfer was not the only one who saw the internal chaos surrounding the attack on Jan. 6. (Schroepfer will step down as a part-time role at Facebook next year.) 

A Facebook document reveals that the incident tested Facebook’s ability stop incitements towards violence. The company then reinstituted 25 safeguards it had put in place for the 2020 election in order to reduce hate speech. These efforts were called “Break The Glass.” 

An employee of Facebook published a detailed examination of the Capitol attack against the company’s internal messaging board. The findings included scathing observations about the inability to stem the rise of the conspiracy movement supported by Donald Trump and “Stop the Steal” followers. The theory claims that President Joe Biden stole our election. 

Facebook detected the first group of this nature on Election Night, early November, and it was immediately disabled. The investigation revealed that hate speech, violence calls, and incitement to violence were all factors. Facebook let new conspiratorial groups remain indefinitely for months, even though it knew that they were violating its guidelines. 

Facebook observed the movement’s “meteoric rates of growth,” according to certain documents. Related groups were also among the fastest growing on Facebook. However, managers did not act as they claimed that they only looked at individual rule violations and failed to see the whole picture. 

According to the report, “Because I was looking at each entity separately, instead of as a cohesive movement,” we could only take down Pages or Groups that had reached a violation threshold. According to the report, Facebook discovered that Stop the Steal was not a single movement when it came under attack at the Capitol. 

Facebook, as evidenced by documents, seemed to have difficulty understanding the motives, influences, tactics, and dynamics of the conspiracies movement. 

According to the internal report, “This type of thorough investigation is time-consuming and requires situational awareness as well context, which we don’t often have.” 

Facebook’s enforcement had been “piecemeal”, according to the research team. The researchers also wrote, “We’re building tools and protocol and having policy conversations to help us do it better next time.” 

Facebook responded to queries about its research by stating that it had spent many years developing defenses and expert knowledge to prevent interference in elections. It said some of its tools are so blunt — equivalent to shutting off an entire town’s roads, it said — that they’re for emergencies only, not normal conditions. 

“It is wrong to claim that these steps were the reason for January 6th — the measures we did need remained in place well into February, and some like not recommending news, civic, or political Groups remain in place to this day,” Facebook said. “These were all part of a much longer and larger strategy to protect the election on our platform — and we are proud of that work.” 

Causing “social-civil warfare”

Another set of Haugen’s documents describes how the computer algorithm behind Facebook’s news feed — the formula that determines what posts people see and in which order — led to unintended consequences over months and years. 

Facebook announced that it would rewrite the algorithm in January 2018, saying it would emphasize “meaningful social interactions” and give more weight to comments, reactions and re-shares among friends, rather than posts from businesses and brands. 

The changes were felt throughout Europe within the year. 

“Political parties from Europe assert that Facebook’s algorithm changes in 2018 [regarding social interactions]radically changed the nature and character of politics. An employee posted an April 2019 internal message stating that things had changed for the worse. The person claimed that Facebook had been responsible for the “social-civil warfare” in Polish online political discourse. He was referring to a conversation with local political operatives. Facebook employees are unable to identify which political parties were involved, nor the names of the people who worked on it. They also don’t know what key issues they addressed. Later that year, the Polish elections focused on European integration, gay rights and expansion of welfare state. reported. The Facebook employee said that extremist parties from different countries rejoiced the fact the new algorithm had rewarded them for “provocation strategies” on subjects like immigration.

Many statisticians, economists, and anyone else who works at Facebook to study the site’s impact, made it their top priority. The documents also show that this was a major goal. According to an internal study published in December 2019, Facebook’s algorithm “are not neutral” and instead favor content that is likely to get attention, including misinformation. 

The researcher wrote, “We know many things that create engagement on our platform leave users split and depressed,” he said. 

According to Haugen’s disclosures, Zuckerberg was presented with several proposed algorithm changes by managers in April 2020. The summary says Zuckerberg rejected some of the proposed changes, including an idea to reduce re-shares — posts that get shared again and again, which researchers found were often misinformation. 

Employees wrote that Mark didn’t believe we could do more with the changes. However, the concept had been used for health-related content and political information. Their conclusion was that they wouldn’t launch the project if MSI impacts were in danger. They used the phrase “meaningful social interactions” to describe engagement. 

Zuckerberg has defended his actions this month by saying that in his Facebook post that the introduction of the MSI system in 2018 led to fewer viral videos, “which we did knowing it would mean people spent less time on Facebook, but that research suggested it was the right thing for people’s well-being.”

“Is it something a company that is focused on profit over people would do?” He said so. 

Facebook stated Friday that they are not responsible to existing social problems. 

“Is it possible to determine the source of divisions around the globe by ranking changes? The company stated that it was not. Research shows that certain divisions within our society are growing over the past decades. This is long before Facebook existed.

Facebook claimed that since 2016, it had spent $13Billion to combat bad content. It also stated that it currently employs 40,000 workers to ensure safety and security. The company stated it will continue to change its platform and run tests to decrease political content. 

In August 2020, a platform integrity employee quit because of Facebook’s inability to protect him from conspiracy theories such as QAnon. 

“We were willing to act only *after* things had spiraled into a dire state,” the employee wrote in a farewell note to colleagues. 

A December farewell note was sent by a data scientist to his colleagues. He stated that he will miss the interesting work, friends, and “amazing pay”. 

He then got to the important parts. 

The person, who was not identified by the Redacted said that “Unfortunately” he didn’t believe he could continue in good conscience. Facebook is “probably having a net adverse influence on Western politics,” wrote the anonymous source, noting that Facebook executives don’t seem committed to solving this problem. “I do not believe that I have the ability to significantly improve them by remaining.” 

Facebook denied that Facebook is a net loss. It stated that Facebook “helps people connect with their friends and families and helps businesses around world thrive.” 

Other languages

According to documents that were shared with Congress and the SEC, sometimes the company does not have the tools to enforce its rules. This is especially true for the large number of users who use Facebook in other languages than English. 

Many documents are focused on North Africa and the Middle East. A December presentation explains how tools used by the company to remove Arabic-language content that had ties with terrorism were incorrect 77% of the times. This “result in a lot false positives” and media backlash. You can find the complete presentation of platform integrity issues printed on more than 50 pages. 

In a statement, Facebook said the measure seemed to be a mischaracterization because it included content related to Hamas and Hezbollah — organizations that some people in the Middle East wouldn’t consider tied to terrorism, but that the U.S. government has on its list of “foreign terrorist organizations.” Facebook claimed that the content was subject to its legal obligation. policy against it. 

Another problem reported is language-based. According to a Facebook researcher, instructions in English are used for Afghan users who want to report hate speech. This was revealed in a January separate analysis. The Community Standards of Facebook, which are the content guidelines for users, have not been translated. 

According to a Facebook researcher who was not named, “There’s a significant gap in hate speech reporting in local languages” (both in accuracy and completeness in translation of entire reporting processes), wrote the author.

Facebook claimed that they review content in Pashto (the Afghan language) and Dari (the Afghan language). The company stated that it is investing additional resources in services to Afghan users. security controls for people fearing the Taliban’s takeover of the government. 

Others show that Facebook’s careful surveillance of social media activities in a country can help to prevent dangerous hate speech, viral misinformation, and other forms of violence. One document details how Facebook brought nearly 300 people together from forty different groups to deal with political misinformation. It also tried to counter what it considered “bad regulation” regarding social media. This effort resulted, in part, in the establishment of an “operations room” temporarily in Singapore.

It also contains the memo that Sophie Zhang (ex-Facebook data scientist) shared with us. Sophie worked as a member of Facebook’s site integrity group from January 2018 through September 2020. This post contains the previously reported by BuzzFeed News, she outlined how she believed Facebook was ignoring manipulation of the platform by political leaders in India, Ukraine, Spain, Brazil, Bolivia, Ecuador and other countries. 

Facebook acknowledged that while it is working to enhance its global capabilities, it acknowledges it has much work ahead of it. 

In a statement, it stated, “In the recent two years, I’ve made investments in to add staff with local language including Arabic as well as topic and country expertise to expand our ability to review content in various languages and dialects globally.” We are currently evaluating a variety of solutions to these problems, including the possibility of hiring content reviewers who have diverse languages capabilities. 

Zhang spoke out in an interview, saying that “the company has employed a lot young idealistic people doing scientific research that is mostly not acted upon.” Facebook seeks free wins to improve the company’s profit margins.  

Zhang however stated that Facebook needs to be able to manage complicated tradeoffs and poor communication in large organisations. 

She stated, “It does not act until there is already a crisis.” 

Possible consequences

Some experts in securities law said that allegations like Haugen’s would not necessarily lead to an SEC investigation. 

Do they actually go right to the heart of the SEC’s mandate to police? Charles Clark was a former SEC enforcement director. He said some of the claims didn’t clearly violate securities laws. While some of her complaints are important for Congress, and the entire world, they don’t directly relate to the SEC’s mandate. 

Clark added, however, that one of Haugen’s allegations — that Facebook is potentially inflating user counts and other metrics important to advertisers — “is the type of matter that the SEC has focused on for many years.” 

The SEC can seek financial penalties for a company or person if the case proceeds. Experts and underwriters have said they are investigating securities law violations. federal lawWhistleblowers could be awarded. Rarely, an executive may be restricted by the SEC. ability to serve as a corporate director or officer. 

Facebook could be facing bigger legal problems than just a possible fine. lawsuit from the Federal Trade Commission seeking to break it up into possibly three pieces. 

The SEC could also respond, according to securities experts. Harvey Pitt (a former chair of the SEC) stated that Haugen’s allegations were credible. The commission should also investigate whether Facebook has met its legal obligations regarding disclosures to investors. 

Pitt said that the documents were “discrediting” in an email response to questions. It is essential that the integrity and transparency of corporate disclosures is maintained. This matter is far too important for staff at the SEC to overlook.