As supporters of former US president Donald Trump stormed the US Capitol on Jan. 6, battling police and forcing lawmakers into hiding, an insurrection of a different kind was taking place inside the world’s largest social media company.
Thousands of kilometers away, in California, Facebook engineers were racing to tweak internal controls to slow the spread of misinformation and inciting content.
Emergency actions — some of which were rolled back after last year’s election — included banning Trump, freezing comments in groups with a record for hate speech, filtering out the “Stop the Steal” rallying cry and empowering content moderators to act more assertively by labeling the US a “Temporary High Risk Location” for political violence.
Photo: AP
At the same time, frustration inside Facebook erupted over what some saw as the company’s halting and inconsistent response to rising extremism in the US.
“Haven’t we had enough time to figure out how to manage discourse without enabling violence?” one employee wrote on an internal message board at the height of the Jan. 6 turmoil. “We’ve been fueling this fire for a long time and we shouldn’t be surprised it’s now out of control.”
It is a question that hangs over the company as the US Congress and regulators investigate its role part in the Jan. 6 riots.
New internal documents provided by former Facebook employee Frances Haugen provide a rare glimpse into how the company appears to have simply stumbled into the riot.
It quickly became clear that even after years under the microscope for insufficiently policing its platform, the social network had missed how riot participants spent weeks vowing — on Facebook itself — to stop Congress from certifying US President Joe Biden’s election victory.
An internal report found that 10 percent of political content viewed by US Facebook users in the days after the election perpetuated the falsehood that the vote had been rigged.
A 2019 internal study, entitled “Carol’s Journey to QAnon,” described the results of an experiment conducted with a test account established to reflect the views of a prototypical “strong conservative” — but not extremist — 41-year North Carolina woman.
Within days, page recommendations for this account generated by Facebook featured “a barrage of extreme, conspiratorial and graphic content.”
The results led the researcher to recommend safety measures, such as removing content with known conspiracy references and disabling “top contributor” badges for misinformation commenters.
Facebook says the situation is more nuanced and that it carefully calibrates its controls, adding that it is not responsible for the actions of the Jan. 6 rioters and that having stricter controls prior to that day would not have helped.
Some employees were unhappy with Facebook’s managing of problematic content even before the riots.
One employee who departed the company last year left a long note charging that promising new tools, backed by strong research, were being constrained by Facebook for “fears of public and policy stakeholder responses.”
Additional reporting by AFP
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