The Washington Post - USA (2021-10-26)

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 26 , 2021. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ SU A

Facebook’s Washington office heard that Zuckerberg was angry about President Biden’s accusa- tion that coronavirus misinformation on Facebook was “killing people.” Zuckerberg felt Biden had unfairly targeted the company and wanted to fight back, according to people who heard a key Zuckerberg adviser, Facebook Vice President for Global Affairs Nick Clegg, express the CEO’s viewpoint. Zuckerberg is married to a phy- sician, runs a foundation focused on health issues and had hoped that Facebook’s ability to help people during the pandemic would be legacy-making. Instead, the plan was going south. In July, Guy Rosen, Facebook’s vice president for integrity, wrote a blog post noting that the White House had missed its own vaccine goals and asserting that Facebook wasn’t to blame for the large number of Americans who re- fused to get vaccinated. Though Biden later backed off his comment, some former executives saw Facebook’s attack on the White House as unnecessary self- sabotage, an example of the company exercising poor judgment in an effort to please Zuckerberg. But complaints about the brash action were met with a familiar response, three people said: It was meant to please the “audience of one.” [email protected] [email protected] [email protected]

Even criticizing Zuckerberg personally can come with costs. An engineer who spoke with The Post, and whose story was reflect- ed in the documents, says he was fired in 2020 after penning an open letter to Zuckerberg on the company’s chat system, accusing the CEO of responsibility for protecting conservatives whose ac- counts had been escalated for misinformation. One document, a 2020 propos- al that indicates it was sent to Zuckerberg for review — over whether to hide like counts on Instagram and Facebook — strongly suggests that Zucker- berg was directly aware of some of the research into harmful effects of the service. It included internal research from 2018 that found that 37 percent of teenagers said one reason that they stopped posting content was because wanting to get enough like counts caused them “stress or anxiety.” (The like-hiding study, named Project Daisy, was also reported by the Journal. In 2021, the company ultimately did offer an op- tion to hide likes on Instagram, but not on Facebook. Facebook says it didn’t implement Project Daisy because a test showed mixed results for people’s well-being and that the 2018 study used in the presentation “cannot be used to show that Instagram causes harm because the survey wasn’t designed to test that, nor does the data show it.”) Over the summer, executives in

keeps spinning and working and
making profits.”
“People felt, it was Mark’s
thing, so he needs it to be success-
ful. It needs to work,” the person
added.
In 2019, those in the company’s
civic integrity division, a roughly
200-person team that focused on
how to mitigate harms caused by
the platform, began to hear that
Zuckerberg himself was becom-
ing very worried about “false pos-
itives” — or legitimate speech
being taken down by mistake.
They were soon asked to justify
their work by providing estimates
of how many “false positives” any
integrity-related project was pro-
ducing, according to one of the
people.
“Our very existence is funda-
mentally opposed to the goals of
the company, the goals of Mark
Zuckerberg,” said another person
who quit. “And it made it so we
had to justify our existence when
other teams didn’t.”
“Founder-CEOs have super-
powers that allow them to do
courageous things. Mark has
done that time and again,”
Samidh Chakrabarti, the former
head of the company’s civic integ-
rity unit, who quit recently, tweet-
ed this month. “But the trust
deficit is real and the FB family
may now better prosper under
distributed leadership.”
Even as Facebook is facing per-
haps its most existential crisis to

ZUCKERBERG FROM A

facebook under fire

of mounting scandals and leaks. (Facebook disputes his isolation.) He primarily communicates decisions through a small inner circle, known as the Small Team, and a slightly bigger group of company leaders known as M-Team, or Mark’s team. Information that gets to him is also tightly con- trolled, as well as information about him.

name to align better with his vision of a virtual-reality-driven “metaverse.” Facebook has said it doesn’t comment on rumors or speculation. The former employees said it was also not surprising that the document trove contains so few references to Zuckerbe rg’s thoughts. He has become more isolated in recent years in the face

date over the whistleblower documents, lately Zuckerberg’s attention has been elsewhere, focused on a push toward virtual-reality hardware in what former executives said was an attempt to dis- tance himself from the problems of the core Facebook platform, known internally as the Big Blue app. The company is reportedly even considering changing its

SAMUEL CORUM/GETTY IMAGES Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, left, and Joel Kaplan, Facebook’s vice president of global public policy, leave a m eeting in 2019 with Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) on Capitol Hill.

BY LOVEDAY MORRIS, ELIZABETH DWOSKIN AND HAMZA SHABAN

Facebook continued to face
seari ng criticism on Monday, as
whistleblower Frances Haugen
provided blistering testimony to
U.K. lawmakers, stirring global
momentum to regulate the social
media giant.
In the first of a series of sched-
uled visits to European capitals,
Haugen, who left Facebook in
May armed with tens of thou-
sands of pages of internal docu-
ments, spoke to the British parlia-
mentary committee charged with
drafting new legislation to tackle
harmful online content.
Haugen told British lawmakers
the easiest way to grow an audi-
ence on Facebook is by using
“anger and hate.” She added, “The
current system is biased towards
bad actors and people who push
people to the extremes.”
U.S. lawmakers also criticized
the social media giant over the
litany of social harms outlined in
the tens of thousands of docu-
ments the whistleblower took
from Facebook, which resulted in
a wave of stories by news organi-
zations showing how the social
media giant has privately and
meticulously tracked real-world
harms exacerbated by its plat-
forms and ignored warnings from
its employees about the risks of
design decisions.
Facebook reported earnings
late Monda y, and chief executive
Mark Zuckerberg took the chance
to fight back against the criticism,
defending the company’s reputa-
tion before spending the bulk of
the investor call talking about the
company’s major investments in
virtual reality and hardware.
He called the stories being pub-
lished by news organizations a

“coordinated effort to selectively use leaked documents to paint a false picture of our company” and spoke about how the media is treating deeply considered trade- offs between free speech and harm too glibly. “It makes a good sound bite that we don’t solve this impossi- ble trade-off because we are just focused on making money,” he said. The trove of documents have triggered arguably the biggest crisis in the company’s 17-year his- tory and have added renewed ur- gency to a global debate about how to rein in the largely unregu- lated and enormously powerful technology industry. The documents include revelations that Facebook knew its software algo- rithms fuel increased polariza- tion, hateful speech and misinformation and were damaging to the mental health of some teenage girls. The documents were disclo- sures made by Haugen ’s legal counsel to the Securities and Ex- change Commission and provided to Congress in redacted form as well as to a consortium of news organizations, including The Washington Post. Some of them were previously reported by the Wall Street Journal. Speaking on Capitol Hill earlier this month, Haugen called for expansive and ambitious regulation as she launched a critique of her former employer, accusing it of putting profits ahead of people, stoking division and harming chil dren. Zuckerberg has described her account as “just not true.” The news stories — as well as Haugen ’s testimony — have triggered a call for legislative action in light of the Facebook revelations, as U.S. lawmakers and

those abroad reiterated their commitments over the past few years to investigate Big Tech. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D- Conn.) said in a statement that the documents show Facebook’s leadership “chronically ignored serious internal alarms, choosing to put profits over people,” and added that the company is “obvi- ously unable to police itself.” Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N .Y.) called for the creation of a new federal agency to protect people’s personal data and ensure privacy as more daily activities move online, she wrote in an op-ed published online by NBC News. Gillibrand has created legislation that would form the agency, which she proposes calling the Data Protection Agency. “The approach companies like Facebook take to data is motivat- ed not by protecting our privacy but by growing their profit and power,” the senator wrote. The agency would be able to review “high-risk” data practices, address people ’s privacy complaints and write new rules for data privacy, s he said. Congress will continue probing tech companies this week, with a hearing on Tuesday about kids’ safety online with testimony from representatives of Snapchat, Tik- Tok and YouTube. But legislative efforts in both the United Kingdom and the Eu- ropean Union are further along, with draft bills in both countries expected to come into law some- time in the first half of next year. Britain’s will introduce independ- ent regulation for the digital world and enforce consumer protection measures. “Frances Haugen has a lot of useful and important insights for any country that is looking to

make a proper regulatory regime for Big Tech,” said Damian Col- lins, a British member of Parlia- ment and chair of the joint committee on the Online Safety Bill. He described such legislation as “overdue.” With Britain likely to become the first country to introduce such a f ramework, “it’s important to get it right,” he said. Sophie Zhang, another whistleblower who formerly worked for Face- book combating “inauthentic ac- tivity” on the site, spoke to the same committee earlier this month. The debate in Britain sur- rounding online safety has become particularly emotionally char ged in the wake of the mur- der of David Amess, a member of Parliament who was stabbed mul- tiple times as he met with con- stituents this month in the dis- trict he represented. While police are still investi- gating the motive in Amess’s killing, it has triggered debate over online abuse aimed at public fig- ures, including members of Par- liament. The 69-year-old Con- servative Party politician had voiced concerns about anony- mous online abuse he had re- ceived before he died, calling for tougher laws. Speaking to British lawmakers last week, Parliament member Mark Francois of the Conserva- tive Party had said that he would like to “drag” Zuckerberg and Twitter chief executive Jack D orsey to Parliament’s bar, “if necessary kicking and screaming, so they can look us all in the eye and account for their actions, or rather their inactions, that make them even richer than they al- ready are.” In its current form, Britain’s online safety bill intends to ex-

tend the remit of Ofcom, the inde- pendent regulator that oversees television and radio, to include Internet content. It provides a legislative framework to ensure that tech companies act with a “duty of care” to protect their users from harm and threatens fines of up to $24.7 million, or 10 percent of global profits, for breaches. The European Union is also in the process of drawing up two pieces of legislation intended to strengthen rules for the digital sphere. Even as it does, Facebook has ambitious plans on the conti- nent, last week announcing 10,000 new jobs in the E.U. to build its “metaverse” — what it bills as connected online worlds. “The need for regulation has definitely strengthened,” said Al- exandra Geese, a member of the European Parliament who spoke with Haugen before her identity was revealed. Haugen is expected to speak to lawmakers in Brussels on Nov. 8. Geese said the revelations with the most impact had included details of a two-tiered world with- in Facebook, in which some high- profile users including politicians and celebrities are shielded from the site’s rules in a system known as “X Check.” “Now to have it in black and white with all the evidence does make a difference, and it does have an influence,” Geese said, adding that Europe’s Digital Ser- vices Act needs to include obliga- tions for nondiscriminatory uni- versal terms and conditions. Christel Schaldemose, the law- maker charged with steering the new legislation through the Euro- pean Parliament, said that she had spoken with Haugen before she had gone public and that the whistleblower’s message to her

had been clear: “Regulate, please regulate.” She said that she “really hoped” that Haugen’s testimony in Brus- sels would have an effect on lawmakers who have been less will- ing to back more stringent regulation. “I think it will have an impact, and I hope it will have an impact,” she said. Facebook itself has repeatedly called for updated regulation of the decades-old U.S. law that gives the technology industry immuni- ty from prosecution for harms that take place on its services. The company has also funded an inde- pendent Oversight Board, made up of outside experts in free speech, to take on its thorniest content decisions in what Zucker- berg called a “model for self-regulation” on Monday’s earnings call. The revelations did not appear to affect the company’s profits or stock price, and investors did not ask about them during the call. Facebook’s stock has been down 15 percent since a peak in Septem- ber, but it is unclear whether the drop is due to the new public scrutiny or other factors. The company said it would be- gin to report out earnings next quarter for its hardware division, Facebook Reality Labs, in which it has been heavily investing. The company is also reportedly considering changing its name to reflect the new focus on virtual reality, hardware and the “metaverse” — a concept Zuckerberg has used to describe how all the services owned by his conglomer- ate would connect to one another. [email protected] [email protected] [email protected]

Cristiano Lima contributed to this report.

Ex-employee’s testimony and documents trigger calls to regulate tech giant

BY CRISTIANO LIMA

A personal decision by Face-
book CEO Mark Zuckerberg leads
to a crackdown on dissent in Viet-
nam. Measures to suppress hate-
ful, deceptive content are lifted
after the American presidential
election in 2020, as pro-Trump
groups disputing the legitimacy
of the election experience “mete-
oric” growth. A dummy test
a ccount on Facebook in India is
flooded with violent anti-Muslim
propaganda — which remains vis-
ible for weeks on the real account
of a frightened Muslim college
student in northern India.
A trove of internal Facebook
documents reveals that the social
media giant has privately and
meticulously tracked real-world
harms exacerbated by its plat-
forms, ignored warnings from its
employees about the risks of their
design decisions and exposed vul-
nerable communities around the
world to a cocktail of dangerous
content.
Disclosed to the U.S. Securities
and Exchange Commission by
whistleblower Frances Haugen,
the Facebook Papers were provid-
ed to Congress in redacted form
by Haugen ’s legal counsel. The

redacted versions were reviewed by a consortium of news organizations, including The Washington Post, which obtained additional internal documents and conduct- ed interviews with dozens of current and former Facebook employees. A mix of presentations, research studies, discussion threads and strategy memos, the Face- book Papers provide an unprec- edented view into how executives at the social media giant weigh trade-offs between public safety and their own bottom line. Some of the documents were first reported by the Wall Street Journal. Here are key takeaways from The Post’s investigation:

Zuckerberg’s public claims often conflict with internal research Haugen references Zucker- berg’s public statements at least 20 times in her SEC complaints, asserting that the CEO’s unique degree of control over Facebook forces him to bear ultimate responsibility for a litany of societal harms caused by the company’s relentless pursuit of growth. The documents also show that Zuckerberg’s public statements

are often at odds with internal company findings. For example, Zuckerberg testi- fied last year before Congress that the company removes 94 percent of the hate speech it finds before a human reports it. But in internal documents, researchers estimat- ed that the company was remov- ing less than 5 percent of all hate speech on Facebook. Facebook spokeswoman Dani Lever denied that Zuckerberg “makes decisions that cause harm” and dismissed the findings, saying they are “based on selected documents that are mischaracter- ized and devoid of any context.”

Facebook dropped its guard before the Jan. 6 insurrection During the run-up to the 2020 U.S. presidential election, the s ocial media giant dialed up efforts to police content that pro- moted violence, misinformation and hate speech. But after Nov. 6, Facebook rolled back many of the dozens of measures aimed at safe- guarding U.S. users. A ban on the main Stop the Steal group didn’t apply to the dozens of look-alike groups that popped up in what the company later concluded was a “coordinated” campaign, docu-

ments show. By the time Facebook tried to reimpose its “break the glass” measures, it was too late: A pro- Trump mob was storming the U.S. Capitol. Facebook officials said they planned exhaustively for the election and its aftermath, anticipat- ed the potential for post-election violence, and always expected the challenges to last through the in- auguration of President Biden on Jan. 20.

Facebook fails to effectively police content in much of the world For all Facebook’s troubles in North America, its problems with hate speech and misinformation are dramatically worse in the de- veloping world. Documents show that Facebook has meticulously studied its approach abroad, and is well aware that weaker modera- tion in non-English-speaking countries leaves the platform vul- nerable to abuse by bad actors and authoritarian regimes. According to one 2020 summa- ry, the vast majority of its efforts against misinformation — 8 4 percent — went toward the United States, the documents show, with

just 16 percent going to the “Rest of World,” including India, France and Italy. Though Facebook considers In- dia a top priority, activating large teams to engage with civil society groups and protect elections, the documents show that Indian users experience Facebook without critical guardrails common in English-speaking countries. Facebook’s Lever said the company has made “progress,” with “global teams with native speak- ers reviewing content in over 70 languages along with experts in humanitarian and human rights issues.” “We’ve hired more people with language, country and topic ex- pertise,” Lever said, adding that Facebook has “also increased the number of team members with work experience in Myanmar and Ethiopia to include former humanitarian aid workers, crisis re- sponders and policy specialists.”

Facebook chooses maximum engagement over user safety Zuckerberg has said the company does not design its products to persuade people to spend more time on them. But dozens of documents suggest the opposite.

The company exhaustively studies potential policy changes for their effects on user engagement and other factors key to corporate profits. Amid this push for user attention, Facebook aban- doned or delayed initiatives to reduce misinformation and radi- calization. One 2019 report tracking a dummy account set up to repre- sent a conservative mother in North Carolina found that Face- book’s recommendation algo- rithms led her to QAnon, an ex- tremist ideology that the FBI has deemed a domestic terrorism threat, in just five days. Still, Face- book allowed QAnon to operate on its site largely unchecked for another 13 months. “We have no commercial or moral incentive to do anything other than give the maximum number of people as much of a positive experience as possible,” Facebook’s Lever said, adding that the company is “constantly making difficult decisions.” [email protected]

Elizabeth Dwoskin, Shibani Mahtani, Cat Zakrzewski, Craig Timberg, Will Oremus and Jeremy Merrill contributed to this report.

A whistleblower’s power: Four key takeaways from the Facebook Papers

The Washington Post - USA (2021-10-26)

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