By David Ingram, Olivia Solon, Brandy Zadrozny and Cyrus Farivar -
NBC News
Hours after the assault on the Capitol on January 6, Mike Schroepfer, Facebook's chief technology officer, posted a notice on the company's internal message board: "Hold on everyone."
He further wrote that Facebook should allow peaceful debate on the unrest, but not calls for violence.
But the employees responded to the message harshly and curtly, and blamed the company for what was happening.
"I have a hard time matching my values with my job here," said a worker in a comment, "I came here hoping to effect change and improve society, but all I have seen is atrophy and abdication of responsibility." .
His name appears in an excerpt from internal company communications accessed by a consortium of news media organizations, including NBC News, the sister network of Noticias Telemundo.
[What Facebook knew about how it radicalized its users]
Starting this Monday, internal company information will be published.
The Wall Street Journal newspaper has already advanced data.
Another employee asked, "How are we expected to ignore that management overrides research-based policy decisions to better serve people like groups that incite violence today?"
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These comments openly challenged the management of the company and suggested that its course favors violent polarization and encourages the dissemination of unfounded information, problems that are not being solved despite the investments and promises of the company.
Documents leaked to Congress
The documents show employees - many of whom were hired to help Facebook troubleshoot its platforms - discussing on those internal message boards how to turn bureaucratic gears and run a company that now has so many departments that even they They themselves are sometimes aware of overlapping responsibilities.
The documents were included in the disclosures made to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and were delivered to Congress by Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee who leaked inside information from Facebook.
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Haugen alleges in at least letters to the SEC's Office of Complaints that Facebook executives, including its CEO Mark Zuckerberg, have misled investors for years, giving them a false picture of reality within the company on issues such as Facebook's user base and its human rights record.
His attorneys provided internal documents to the SEC to support his allegations.
Haugen also offers his assistance to the SEC if the SEC investigated possible violations of securities laws.
The revelations of this former employee have opened a debate about the impact of Facebook on society, both in the United States and in other countries.
"At the center of these allegations is the idea that we prioritize benefits over safety and well-being. That's not true," says Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images file
"Facebook did not invent partisanship. It did not invent polarization. It did not invent ethnic violence," he said in a call with reporters this month, "but what I think we should discuss is what role, what decisions did the company make to expose the public to a higher risk than necessary. "
Haugen repeated his accusation against Facebook executives in his testimony before Congress this month.
"The company intentionally withholds vital information from the public, the United States Government, and around the world," he told the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Consumer Protection.
[
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According to Haugen's revelations:
The company spends a lot of time and resources studying how to solve these problems, but in some cases it has refused to apply possible solutions proposed by its own researchers. Employees complain that this is sometimes because Facebook's Washington-based policy team has veto power over decisions. Joel Kaplan, the company's global head of public policy, has repeatedly defended his influence, saying he pushes for analytical and methodological rigor on issues like the algorithms that power Facebook products.
A change to the Facebook news channel in 2018 that was intended to bring friends and family closer together in a meaningful way had the opposite effect, according to internal researchers.
Posts spread more easily if they included outrage or misinformation, sparking a "social-civil war" online abroad in places like Poland.
Engineers and statisticians struggle to understand why certain posts and not others gain traction through shared Facebook posts and how to fix "unhealthy side effects."
Facebook has struggled to filter many posts that violated its rules.
The documents note that the company's automated systems removed only about 2% of hate speech as of 2019 and, as of this year, less than 1% of content that attempts to incite violence.
Many documents highlight Facebook's inability to police its platform outside of the United States, including in Myanmar and Sri Lanka, where the company has apologized for its actions that contribute to physical violence against religious or ethnic groups.
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It is unknown if the SEC is investigating Facebook or if it would see enough material in the disclosures to warrant an investigation.
The agency declined to comment.
Several securities law experts said it would not be easy to prove that an infringement was committed.
"Regulators like clean cases, and they like that someone is on tape doing something wrong," said Joshua Mitts, a professor of securities law at Columbia University.
Haugen's allegations are not a "clean case," according to Mitts.
Facebook response
Zuckerberg has disputed Haugen's allegations.
"At the center of these allegations is the idea that we prioritize benefits over safety and well-being. That is not true," he said in a post on the social network on October 5.
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Facebook's head of public relations reported last week that Haugen's disclosures were an "orchestrated campaign" led by his advisers.
"A selection of millions of Facebook documents cannot be used in any way to draw fair conclusions about us," Vice President of Communications John Pinette said in a tweet ahead of the disclosures.
Haugen has enlisted the help of experienced attorneys and public relations consultants.
A law firm run by Obama White House spokesman Bill Burton handles media requests, and Haugen is represented by attorneys from Whistleblower Aid, a nonprofit organization.
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Internal turmoil can be a greater threat than external scrutiny.
If the company cannot attract, retain and motivate talented employees, it could lose its ability to compete effectively, it said in its last annual report in January.
A Facebook employee wrote on an internal message board on January 6: "We have been faced with questions for years that we cannot answer from our friends, family and colleagues in the industry. Recruitment, in particular, has become more difficult throughout the years. over the years, as Facebook's ethical reputation continues to deteriorate. "
83% of Facebook employees say they would recommend it as a great place to work and that it has hired more employees this year than in any previous year, according to the company itself.
Impact of January 6
Internal turmoil over the January 6 attack was evident in the documents, beyond Schroepfer's intern position, who plans to leave his part-time position at Facebook next year.
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According to a Facebook document, the unrest so tested the company's ability to curb incitement to violence that the company reinstated 25 safeguards it had around the 2020 presidential election to minimize hate speech and other contrary content. to the standards of the platform.
The efforts were called
Break the Glass
.
Later, a Facebook employee posted an examination of the prolegomena of the Capitol attack on the company's internal message board, with scathing conclusions about its failure to stop the growth of the conspiracy theory movement promoted by the Former President Donald Trump and his supporters, known as
Stop the Steal
.
Believers of this theory falsely claim that President Joe Biden stole the election.
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The company was alerted to the first such group on election night in early November and deactivated it due to incitement to hatred and violence in the comments, according to the investigation.
But in the months that followed, Facebook allowed new conspiracy theory groups to continue to exist, even while acknowledging that the groups violated its rules.
Facebook looked at the movement's "meteoric growth rates," and related groups were among the fastest growing on the social network, according to some of the documents.
But the administrators did not act because, according to them, they examined the infractions of the norms one by one and did not see the big picture.
[What Facebook knew about how it radicalized its users]
"Because we were looking at each entity individually, rather than as a cohesive movement, we were only able to remove groups and individual pages once they exceeded the violation threshold," the report notes.
Facebook realized that
Stop the Steal
was a cohesive movement only after the attack on the Capitol, according to the document.
The company seemed incapable of understanding the dynamics, influencers, tactics and ultimate intentions of the conspiracy movement, even when it was operating in full view, the documents suggest.
"This kind of in-depth investigation takes time, situational awareness, and a context that we often don't have," the research adds.
The team of researchers wrote that Facebook's enforcement of the law was "piecemeal" and that "we are creating tools and protocols and holding policy discussions that will help us do better next time."
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In a statement responding to questions about the investigation, Facebook said it has spent years building defenses and gaining experience in stopping election interference.
He said some of his tools are so blunt - equivalent to cutting off the roads of an entire city - that they are only for emergencies, not normal conditions.
"It is wrong to say that these measures were the reason for the January 6 assault: the measures we needed remained in force until well into February, and some, such as not recommending news, civic or political groups, remain in force until today," Facebook said.
"All of them were part of a much longer and broader strategy to protect elections on our platform, and we are proud of that work."