An analysis of Facebook whistleblower's complaints

Facebook's week was the beginning of turmoil. On Monday, Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram were down for about 6 hours. On Tuesday, after thousands of pages of internal research and documents were released, Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen testified before the Senate subcommittee. Haugen, a 37-year-old former Facebook (FB) product manager who has dealt with citizen integrity issues at the company, revealed her identity in the "60 Minutes" program that aired on Sunday night. According to reports, she filed at least eight whistleblower complaints with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, accusing the company of concealing research on its deficiencies from investors and the public. She also shared the documents with regulators and the Wall Street Journal, which published a multi-faceted investigation that showed that Facebook was aware of problems with its apps. "60 Minutes" published eight complaints from Hogan on Monday. 

Here are the four main points of the complaint:

Facebook's mechanics further the spread of misinformation

The internal documents cited in the complaint show that Facebook knows that hate speech and misinformation on its platform are having social impact, and that its "core product mechanisms, such as viral recommendation and participation optimization, are important reasons for such speech." Prosperity." In a study on misinformation and polarization risks encountered through recommendations, it took only a few days for Facebook’s algorithm to recommend the conspiracy page to an account that followed Fox News, Donald Trump, etc. The official, verified page of conservative figures. The same account was recommended by QAnon in less than a week.According to the documents cited in the complaint titled "They used to post selfies and now they are trying to reverse the election" and "Does Facebook reward anger", Facebook's algorithm not only rewards posts on topics such as election fraud conspiracy, such as likes and shares, And "'The more negative comments a piece of content triggers, the more likely the link will get more traffic.'" A document entitled "What is collateral damage?" even pointed out that "The end result is that Facebook as a whole will actively (if not necessarily consciously) promote these types of activities. The mechanism of our platform is not neutral."

Facebook has taken limited action to address existing misinformation

According to an internal document about problematic non-violating narratives mentioned in at least two complaints, Facebook removed 3% to 5% of hate speech and less than 1% of content deemed to be violent or inciting violence. This is because for human reviewers, the number is too much, and when context must be considered, its algorithm is difficult to accurately classify content. Internal documents regarding Facebook’s role in the 2020 election and the January 6 riots also show that the company’s intervention mechanisms rarely stop those who spread misinformation. A document states that “enforcement on pages managed by page administrators that have posted more than 2 error messages in the past 67 days will affect 277,000 pages. Of these, 11,000 pages are current repeat offender pages.”Although Facebook claims that they “will remove content from Facebook when it violates our standards regardless of who posted the content.” According to Haugen, “in fact, the'XCheck' or'Cross-Check' system effectively The list is'high-profile and/or privileged users.' An internal document on error prevention cited in the complaint argued that, “'Many XChecked pages, configuration files and entities have been exempted from enforcement over the years.'” The internal documents on "quantifying the number of user reposts and the concentration of VPV" and "killswitch plan for all group recommendation interfaces" indicate that Facebook has also rolled back some changes that have been proven to reduce misinformation because these changes reduce the platform growth of platform.In addition, Hoogen claimed that the company falsely told advertisers that they had done all they could to stop the rebellion. According to a document cited in the document titled "Congress Riot Breaks Glass", Facebook implemented safer parameters for the 2020 election, such as downgrading content such as hate speech that may violate its community standards, and was actually later revoked and " Only after the uprising broke out. " In a document, a Facebook official stated that "we are only willing to take action after * things have reached a terrible state."

Children and teens are negatively affected by Facebook, especially young girls, because of an erroneous assertion made by Facebook

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg answered, "I don't believe that Facebook's platforms harm children," during a congressional hearing in March.

In a complaint filed with Haugen, Facebook claims that internal research shows 13.5% of teenagers say Instagram makes thoughts of 'Suicide and Self Injury' worse, and 18% say it makes "Eating Issues" like anorexia worse. Researchers found that Facebook's platforms worsen body image issues among 1 out of 3 girls.

Facebook knows its platforms enable human exploitation

Although Facebook’s community standards stated that they “removed content that promoted or coordinated the exploitation of human beings,” internal company documents cited in a Haugen complaint indicated that before BBC News conducted an investigation in 2019, the company knew that “the platform is still The existence of domestic servitude content" enters the black market of domestic workers on Instagram. A document titled "Family Slavery and Tracking in the Middle East" stated: "We are ineffective in implementing confirmed platform-related abuses." "Our survey results show that... our platform is realized through real-world networks. All three stages of the human exploitation life cycle (recruitment, promotion, exploitation).... Traffickers, recruiters and promoters from these'organizations' used FB profiles, IG profiles, homepages, Messenger and WhatsApp."