Posted on Oct 23, 2021 at 2:15 PMUpdated Oct 24, 2021, 6:36 AM
Facebook is not done with the shattering revelations. After Frances Haugen’s testimony to Congress , a new whistleblower has emerged according to the “Washington Post” . It is said to be a former member of the Facebook team responsible for the civic integrity of the platform. Like his former colleague, he accuses managers of putting profits before moderation of problematic content.
According to the American daily, this whistleblower made a statement to the SEC, the stock exchange authority. It was signed on October 13, a week after Frances Haugen’s resounding testimony before the US Congress.
Facebook has been in turmoil since last month. the Wall Street Journal was the first to relay information obtained by the whistleblower before her departure from the group. Among these revelations, documents showing that Facebook feared the impact of its Instagram channel on the adolescent mental health were the center of attention.
A “flash in the pan”
This second whistleblower relates in particular to comments made in 2017 by Tucker Bounds, a member of the Facebook communications team. At the time, the company was looking for the best way to manage the controversy over Russia’s interference in the 2016 US presidential election via its platform. “It will be a flash in the pan. Elected officials will moan. And within a few weeks, they will have moved on. In the meantime, we print money in the basement and everything is fine, ”he would have declared.
According to the “Washington Post”, this new whistleblower ensures that Facebook managers regularly undermined efforts to fight disinformation, hate speech and other problematic content for fear of angering former US President Donald Trump and his political allies. They also feared losing the attention of users, essential to voluminous profits of the group.
The story repeats itself
New documents that the whistleblower Frances Haugen leaked and that various American newspapers obtained, show that history repeated itself in 2020. Facebook was aware of the radicalization of many users and the flood of related disinformation with last year’s US presidential election but failed to respond accordingly.
At the beginning of November, says the “New York Times” , a few days after the poll, for example, an analyst let his colleagues know that 10% of political content viewed by American users of the platform were messages assuring that the vote had been rigged.
This baseless rumor, hammered out by ex-President Donald Trump, fueled the anger of many conservatives and conspirators, which culminated with the riots on the Capitol on January 6 . In the process, Facebook, like Twitter and other major platforms , banned Donald Trump and the extremist movements involved in the riots. According to new revelations published Friday by American newspapers, Facebook employees believe that the platform could have better anticipated the problem.
The “supervisory board” of Facebook, a body set up by the platform to deal with disputes over content moderation as a last resort, has also just ruled, in its first report on transparency, that Facebook had on several occasions “Failed” to “provide relevant information”. It refers in particular to the derogatory rules for high visibility users , only revealed by the “Facebook Files” which leaked to the press.
Controversies and new name
In a statement, Facebook said it had taken “additional measures” to fight disinformation before, during and after the US election. The Californian firm, which publishes its third quarter results on Monday, has to face the hostility of elected officials , which could decide to impose a stricter legislative framework.
The group is organizing a conference on virtual and augmented reality next Thursday. According to The Verge , he could take the opportunity to announce a name change, in order to emphasize his ambitions in terms of metaverse, a virtual 3D world that could constitute the future of the internet. This name change would be timely to make people forget the current setbacks of the group.
Because the problems will not stop there for the group of Mark Zuckerberg: a consortium of ten press organizations, from CNN to the “World”, is preparing to publish articles based on the documents of the launchers of ‘alert, according to The Information .
Uplifting internal experiences
The Wall Street Journal tells how a researcher working for Facebook created a fictitious account named Carol Smith, “conservative mom” of Wilmington, North Carolina, interested in “young children, parenthood, Christianity, civics and education. the community “. His tastes leaned to the right, but not to the extreme right.
On the first day of the experiment, the algorithm recommended humorous memes and generally conservative groups, which the fictional Ms Smith joined. On the second day, he was almost exclusively recommending right-wing content, including some that leaned toward conspiracy theories. By day five, the platform directed Ms Smith to groups clearly affiliated with QAnon. The selected content included false allegations of “white genocide” and “a video promoting a banned hate group”.
A subsequent study of the platform’s recommendations to a liberal user revealed a similar distorting effect. The documents show that Facebook employees did alert their management, which was then very reluctant to react.