“We must do more” against disinformation in countries deemed “at risk”, admitted Nick Clegg, vice president of Facebook, on Tuesday, in turmoil after a series of revelations indicating that the company does not devote sufficient resources to contain this problem.
Nearly 87% of Facebook’s budget devoted to combating disinformation is concentrated in the United States, while the vast majority of its users are elsewhere, according to the “Facebook Papers”, thousands of internal documents revealed by whistleblower Frances Haugen.
Content moderation
While he admitted to the audience at the Web Summit in Lisbon that “legitimate issues” emerged after the “Facebook Papers”, Nick Clegg insisted that the company had devoted “significant resources” to improving the situation. .
“We now have content moderation in over 70 countries, and we are constantly adding more,” he said in a videoconference intervention, adding that moderators in 12 new languages, including Haitian Creole, had been hired this year. “We have obviously learned some pretty harsh lessons from what happened in Myanmar,” he added, referring to the widespread use of Facebook to fuel ethnic violence in the country.
Facebook’s role in the spread in India of hateful images and speech likely to exacerbate inter-community conflicts has also been revealed through the disclosure of internal documents by various American media. This attitude is in the wake of what Frances Haugen denounces more generally: Facebook knows and studies the problems but chooses, in large part, to ignore them or not to devote sufficient resources to contain them.
“Security” before the “metaverse”
Headliner of the opening session of the great digital mass in Lisbon, the whistleblower had urged Facebook on Monday to invest in “security” before the “metaverse”, the new strategic priority of the group now baptized Meta. “Again and again, Facebook chooses to expand into new areas rather than sticking to what it has already done. I find that unacceptable… More resources must be devoted to basic security systems, ”she said.
“Instead of investing to ensure that their platforms are a minimum safe, they are about to hire 10,000 engineers” in Europe for the development of the “metaverse”, she added about the parallel world digital which represents, according to the boss of Facebook, the future of the Internet. “I can’t imagine how that could make sense,” she said again.