haugen, Frances civic integrity

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/02/facebook-investors/

Facebook misled investors about battling climate and COVID lies: SEC filings

Jessica Corbett and Common Dreams February 20, 2022

In complaints to the U.S. government, Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen accused the tech giant of misleading investors about combating climate and Covid-19 misinformation, The Washington Post revealed Friday.

Haugen has gained international attention for speaking out in the press and testifying to Congress. The former Facebook employee is represented by Whistleblower Aid, which filed the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) complaints earlier this month.

The newspaper's reporting on redacted copies of the documents sparked demands for reforms at the social media network and its parent company, which rebranded as Meta last year in the face of widespread criticism.

"Frances Haugen's SEC filing shows yet again that Facebook cannot be trusted and needs Congress to step in to stop the spread of disinformation," said Michael Khoo, co-chair of the Climate Disinformation Coalition at Friends of the Earth.

As the Post's Cat Zakrzewski reported:

One complaint alleges that climate change misinformation was prominently available on Facebook and that the company lacked a clear policy on the issue as recently as last year, despite Facebook executives' committing to fight the "global crisis" during earnings calls. A second, companion complaint argues that while Facebook executives were publicly touting their efforts to remove harmful Covid misinformation, internal documents "paint a different story."

The complaint cites internal company communications about the spread of vaccine hesitancy in comments and internal surveys that showed the proliferation of Covid misinformation on the service.

"Facebook appears now to be spreading disinformation about its disinformation,"declared Khoo, noting that in an October 2021 letter, Nick Clegg, then-vice president of global affairs and communications at Facebook, "told the Climate Disinformation Coalition that there is only a 'small amount' of climate change disinformation on the platform."

Clegg, who was previously the U.K.'s deputy prime minister and led the Liberal Democrats party, was promoted this week to head of global affairs at Meta—a role that will put him "at the level" of CEO Mark Zuckerberg and chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg.

Similar to Clegg's letter, Meta spokesperson Drew Pusateri "said that misinformation makes up a small amount of climate change content in the company's apps, and that it spikes periodically, such as during extreme weather events," the Post reported Friday. "He said the company has taken steps to make it easier for fact-checkers to find climate content."

Pusateri also highlighted the company's efforts to remove vaccine misinformation and elevate "authoritative information" on public health and climate, adding that "there are no one-size-fits-all solutions to stopping the spread of misinformation, but we're committed to building new tools and policies to combat it."

However, activists and experts are not impressed. The Post explained that "the company adds information labels to some posts about climate change, and it reduces distribution of posts that its fact-checking partners rate as false. But it generally does not remove those posts, as it does with certain false claims about vaccines and the coronavirus."

Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, told the newspaper that the company's approach is "disturbing."

"Unmitigated climate change is projected to lead to far greater numbers of human fatalities than Covid-19," said Mann, known for debunking climate lies, including in recent testimony to Congress. "The fact that they're treating greater threat with so much less urgency and care is problematic."

Fossil Free Media director Jamie Henn tweeted Friday that "Facebook hasn't even taken the most obvious step to combatting climate disinformation: banning fossil fuel advertising. They don't allow tobacco or firearms ads—so why allow fossil fuels?"

According to Khoo at Friends of the Earth:

Whether it's fueling the insurrection, trans-youth bullying, teen body image issues, or climate denial, Facebook's algorithm enables the small fringe to tear apart our communities and our values. When last year's winter storm decimated Texas residents, a few fossil fuel-backed voices falsely blamed frozen windmills, and we documented how that narrative exploded on Facebook.

Congress must now step in and require the type of safety reporting that is found in industries from car manufacturers to agriculture. It must force Facebook to disclose its data on platform safety and extremism, with ecosystem-wide reports on disinformation harms.

"Facebook amplifies fringe views like climate denial," the campaigner added, "and we must stop it from letting a radical minority overpower the majority."

At least some federal lawmakers are already paying attention to the company's conduct, as three Democratic senators made clear in a December letter to Zuckerberg.

"Disinformation that downplays the crisis or rejects climate change threatens the potential for humankind to act collectively to pull itself back from the brink," they wrote. "Your content moderation decisions can either galvanize an effort to save our plant or quash it."

https://www.alternet.org/2022/01/facebook-jan-6/

pro pub

Series: The Insurrection

The Effort to Overturn the Election

Facebook groups swelled with at least 650,000 posts attacking the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s victory between Election Day and the Jan. 6 siege of the U.S. Capitol, with many calling for executions or other political violence, an investigation by ProPublica and The Washington Post has found.

The barrage — averaging at least 10,000 posts a day, a scale not reported previously— turned the groups into incubators for the baseless claims supporters of then-President Donald Trump voiced as they stormed the Capitol, demanding he get a second term. Many posts portrayed Biden’s election as the result of widespread fraud that required extraordinary action — including the use of force — to prevent the nation from falling into the hands of traitors.

“LOOKS LIKE CIVIL WAR is BECOMING INEVITABLE!!!” read a post a month before the Capitol assault. “WE CANNOT ALLOW FRAUDULENT ELECTIONS TO STAND ! SILENT NO MORE MAJORITY MUST RISE UP NOW AND DEMAND BATTLEGROUND STATES NOT TO CERTIFY FRAUDULENT ELECTIONS NOW !”

Another post, made 10 days after the election, bore the avatar of a smiling woman with her arms raised in apparent triumph and read, “WE ARE AMERICANS!!! WE FOUGHT AND DIED TO START OUR COUNTRY! WE ARE GOING TO FIGHT...FIGHT LIKE HELL. WE WILL SAVE HER❤ THEN WERE GOING TO SHOOT THE TRAITORS!!!!!!!!!!!”

One post showed a Civil War-era picture of a gallows with more than two dozen nooses and hooded figures waiting to be hanged. Other posts called for arrests and executions of specific public figures — both Democrats and Republicans — depicted as betraying the nation by denying Trump a second term.

“BILL BARR WE WILL BE COMING FOR YOU,” wrote a group member after Barr announced the Justice Department had found little evidence to support Trump’s claims of widespread vote rigging. “WE WILL HAVECIVIL WAR IN THE STREETS BEFORE BIDEN WILL BE PRES.”

Facebook executives have downplayed the company’s role in the Jan. 6 attack and have resisted calls, including from its own Oversight Board, for a comprehensive internal investigation. The company also has yet to turn over all the information requested by the congressional committee studying the Jan. 6 attack. Facebook said it is continuing to negotiate with the committee.

The ProPublica/Post investigation, which analyzed millions of posts between Election Day and Jan. 6 and drew on internal company documents and interviews with former employees, provides the clearest evidence yet that Facebook played a critical role in the spread of false narratives that fomented the violence of Jan. 6.

Its efforts to police such content, the investigation also found, were ineffective and started too late to quell the surge of angry, hateful misinformation coursing through Facebook groups — some of it explicitly calling for violent confrontation with government officials, a theme that foreshadowed the storming of the Capitol that day amid clashes that left five people dead.

Drew Pusateri, a spokesperson for Meta, Facebook’s newly renamed parent company, said that it was not responsible for the violence on Jan. 6. He pointed instead to Trump and others who voiced the lies that sparked the siege on the Capitol.

“The notion that the January 6 insurrection would not have happened but for Facebook is absurd,” Pusateri said. “The former President of the United States pushed a narrative that the election was stolen, including in-person a short distance from the Capitol building that day. The responsibility for the violence that occurred on January 6 lies with those who attacked our Capitol and those who encouraged them.”

To determine the extent of posts attacking Biden’s victory, The Post and ProPublica obtained a unique dataset of 100,000 groups and their posts, along with metadata and images, compiled by CounterAction, a firm that studies online disinformation. The Post and ProPublica used machine learning to narrow that list to 27,000 public groups that showed clear markers of focusing on U.S. politics. Out of the more than 18 million posts in those groups between Election Day and Jan. 6, the analysis searched for words and phrases to identify attacks on the election’s integrity.

The more than 650,000 posts attacking the election — and the 10,000-per-day average — is almost certainly an undercount. The ProPublica/Washington Post analysis only examined posts in a portion of all public groups, and did not include comments, posts in private groups or posts on individuals’ profiles. Only Facebook has access to all the data to calculate the true total — and it hasn’t done so publicly.

Facebook has heavily promoted groups since CEO Mark Zuckerberg made them a strategic priority in 2017. But the ones focused on U.S. politics have become so toxic, say former Facebook employees, that the company established a task force, whose existence has not been previously reported, specifically to police them ahead of Election Day 2020.

The task force removed hundreds of groups with violent or hateful content in the months before Nov. 3, according to the ProPublica/Post investigation.

Yet shortly after the vote, Facebook dissolved the task force and rolled back other intensive enforcement measures. The results of that decision were clear in the data ProPublica and The Post examined: During the nine increasingly tense weeks that led up to Jan. 6, the groups were inundated with posts attacking the legitimacy of Biden’s election while the pace of removals noticeably slowed. Removals did not pick up again until the week of Jan. 6, but even then many of the groups and their posts remained on the site for months after, as Trump supporters continued to falsely claim election fraud and press for states to conduct audits of the vote or to impose new voting restrictions.

“Facebook took its eye off the ball in the interim time between Election Day and Jan. 6,” said a former integrity team employee who worked on the groups task force and, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal matters. “There was a lot of violating content that did appear on the platform that wouldn’t otherwise have.”

Pusateri denied that the company had pulled back on efforts to combat violent and false postings about the election after the vote. He did not comment on the quantitative findings of the ProPublica/Post investigation.

“The idea that we deprioritized our Civic Integrity work in any way is simply not true,” he said. “We integrated it into a larger Central Integrity team to allow us to apply the work that this team pioneered for elections to other challenges like health-related issues for example. Their work continues to this day.”

The investigation also reveals a problem with the way Facebook polices its groups. Former employees say groups are essential to the company’s ability to keep a stagnant American user base as engaged as possible and boost its revenue, which reached nearly $86 billion in 2020.

But they say as groups have grown more central to Meta’s bottom line, the company’s enforcement efforts have been weak, inconsistent and heavily reliant on the work of unpaid group administrators to do the labor-intensive work of reviewing posts and removing the ones that violate company policies. Many groups have hundreds of thousands or even millions of members, dramatically escalating the challenges of policing posts.

With the administrators themselves steeped in conspiracy theories about the election or, for example, the safety of COVID-19 vaccines, reliable enforcement rarely takes place, say former employees. They say automated tools — which search for particular terms indicating policy violations — are ineffective and easily evaded by users simply misspelling key words.

“Groups are a disaster,” said Frances Haugen, a former member of Facebook’s Civic Integrity team who filed a whistleblower complaint against the company and testified before Congress warning about the damaging effects of the company on democracy worldwide, as well as other problems.

Many of the group posts identified in the analysis fell into what a March internal Facebook report, first published by Politico, defined as “harmful non-violating narratives.” This refers to content that does not break Facebook’s rules, but whose prevalence can cause people to “act in ways which are harmful to themselves, others, or society at large.”

The report warned that such harmful narratives could have had “substantial negative impacts including contributing materially to the Capitol riot and potentially reducing collective civic engagement and social cohesion in the years to come.”

Pusateri declined to comment on specific posts but said the company does not have a policy forbidding posts or comments that attack the legitimacy of the election. He said the company has a dedicated groups integrity team and an ongoing initiative to protect people who use groups from harm.

Facebook officials have noted that more extreme content flowed through smaller social media platforms in the buildup to the Capitol attack, including detailed planning on bringing guns or building gallows that day. But Trump also used Facebook as a key platform for his lies about the election right up until he was banned on Jan. 6. And Facebook’s reliance on groups to drive engagement gave those lies unequaled reach. This combined with the sag in post-election enforcement to make Facebook a key vector for pushing the ideas that fueled violence on Jan. 6.

Critics and former employees say this also underscores a recurring issue with the platform since its founding in Zuckerberg’s Harvard University dorm room in 2004: The company recognizes the need for enforcement only after a problem has caused serious damage, often in the form of real-world mayhem and violence.

Facebook didn’t discover the campaign by the Russia-based Internet Research Agency to spread hyperpartisan content and disinformation during the 2016 presidential election until months after Americans had voted. The company’s actions were late as well when Myanmar’s military leaders used Facebook to foment rapes, murders and forced migrations of minority Rohingya people. Facebook has apologized for failings in both cases.

The response to attacks on the legitimacy of the 2020 U.S. presidential election was similarly slow, as company officials debated among themselves whether and how to block the rapidly metastasizing lies about the election. The data shows they acted aggressively and comprehensively only after Trump supporters had battered their way into the Capitol, sending lawmakers fleeing for their lives.

The ProPublica/Post investigation “is a new and very important illustration of the company's unfortunate tendency to deal with safety problems on its platform in a reactive way,” said Paul Barrett, the deputy director of the Center for Business and Human Rights at New York University's Stern School of Business. “And that almost by definition means that the company will be less effective, because it will not be looking out into the future and preventing problems before they happen.”

The Trouble With Policing Groups

Facebook’s newly vigorous enforcement actions the week of Jan. 6 — which resulted in Trump himself being banned from the platform — marked such a stark contrast from the company’s previous approach that some Trump supporters took to Facebook to complain about the reversal.

“Facebook is Getting Real Brave and Vicious Now,” Jerry Smith, a retired police officer from Missouri who created and ran a group called United Conservatives for America, wrote the day after the Capitol attack. “They Are Removing Tons of Posts From My Groups!”

In a recent interview at his home, Smith said he could not remember writing that message or which deletions prompted his response. He said he opposed political violence and posts that called for it. But he acknowledged it was difficult for him to remove such content as United Conservatives for America’s membership swelled to more than 11,000, with the number of posts surpassing what one person could monitor. The typical group in the ProPublica/Post analysis had more than 1,000 members.

Smith, who showed a reporter that his Facebook account had received 116 violations for breaking company rules, said he found some of Facebook’s policies reasonable but disagreed on how they should be enforced. He posted in United Conservatives for America and other groups at a frenetic pace long before Election Day. As early as the summer of 2020, he warned about alleged Democratic party plans to steal the election and also shared false information about the pandemic, including a video from a conspiracy theorist about the origins of the virus.

“And DEMS Are Pushing For Vote By Mail. Another Way For Them To Steal The Election,” he wrote in August 2020.

In the interview, Smith said he believes that American elections often are rigged and worries that COVID-19 vaccines may be tainted. He has used Facebook groups to share these beliefs with tens of thousands of people — and thinks Facebook’s enforcement of its policies is overly aggressive and a result of political bias against conservatives.

“Are you going to do away with their free speech?” said Smith. “If someone thinks it’s not a fair election … why can’t they have their opinion on whether it’s a fair election or not?”

Facebook Cracked Down Before the Election

Facebook’s problems with groups had long been obvious to company employees, who gathered on a remote video conference in early September 2020 to figure out how to stop groups from spreading hate, violent threats and misinformation as Election Day approached, according to former employees.

Known as the Group Task Force, the new unit they formed consisted of members of Facebook’s Civic Integrity team, the specialized unit charged with protecting elections on the platform, as well as employees from engineering and operations teams who help oversee the contract moderators who review posts flagged by users or by automated systems, former employees said. The goal of the task force was to identify political groups with large numbers of posts and comments that violated the social giant’s rules against hate speech and calls for violence. Former employees involved in the effort said they wanted to apply the platform’s rules while respecting political debate and dialogue.

At the same time, Facebook’s Dangerous Individuals and Organizations team was identifying and removing QAnon groups ahead of the election. The results of the two teams’ actions were striking. All of the more than 300 QAnon groups identified by ProPublica and The Post had been removed by October 2020, when Facebook announced a total ban on the movement, the analysis found.

In the end, the Group Task Force removed nearly 400 groups whose posts had been seen nearly 1 billion times before Election Day,according to a post on Workplace, Facebook’s internal discussion tool. The document later was included in the Facebook Papers disclosed by Haugen to Congress and the Securities and Exchange Commission. Still, members of the task force told ProPublica and The Post that the existence of such a team was an indictment of Facebook’s failure to police groups as part of its normal operations.

“The whole thing of the civic team needing to come in and do the takedowns was not a good state of affairs,” said one employee involved in the task force. “You could make a good argument that this should have already been done.”

On Nov. 5, Facebook banned “Stop the Steal,” a hugely viral group created on Election Day itself that quickly attracted over 300,000 members around a message rooted in attacking the legitimacy of the election. The company cited the prevalence of posts calling for violence and using hate speech in banning the group and all other groups using a similar name.

The next day, Nov. 6, the Group Task Force gathered virtually to celebrate its efforts, former employees said. Days later, a task force member published a Workplace post titled “Some Reflections on US2020” to bring attention to its work.

“Along with heroic efforts from other teams across the company, I truly believe the Group Task Force made the election safer and prevented possible instances of real world violence,” said the post.

But the focus on U.S. political groups and content undermining the election wouldn't last.

A Noticeable Drop in Enforcement

On Dec. 2, Facebook executives disbanded the Civic Integrity team and scattered its members to other parts of Facebook’s overall integrity team, reducing their influence. That resulted in the demise of the Group Task Force. The company also rolled back several emergency measures that had been put in place leading up to Election Day to control misbehavior in Facebook groups.

The Post/ProPublica investigation reveals the result: During the lull in enforcement, hundreds of thousands of posts questioned the legitimacy of Biden’s victory, spread lies about voter fraud and at times called for violence. Meanwhile, the company’s pace of group removals slowed to a crawl, the data analysis shows.

Among the content spreading in groups were videos in which former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn spread false claims of electoral fraud and called for martial law.(Through a spokesperson, Flynn declined to comment.) Another frequent post was a cartoon showing Trump chasing a masked Biden, who carried a bag labeled “election theft” with swing states depicted inside. It was posted more than 350 times in the political groups analyzed by ProPublica and the Post, attracting over 2,500 total likes.

One meme featured a photo of former Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., who rose to fame in right-wing circles by leading a congressional committee’s investigation into the deadly 2012 attack on the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, accompanied by the text “If you are ok with rigging an election to win, I am ok with martial law to stop you…” That was posted in groups at least 97 times, garnering over 3,500 total likes. Gowdy has denied saying the phrase.

Another meme showed a photo of Trump winking, with the text “Not Only Can Martial Law Guarantee a Trump Victory, It Also Allows Trump To Arrest Anyone He Wants!” It was posted at least 70 times, generating more than 2,400 total likes. The images and their spread in groups was identified using a CounterAction image analysis tool.

“Everyone needs to make a show of FORCE in DC on the 6th and any congress who doesnt follow the constitution or who doesnt stand up for our president (Pence included) needs to be ’corrected’ by WE the PEOPLE - on the front steps of the state house - for all the world to see!!! THIS IS HOW THE US DEALS WITH HER TRAITORS!!!” read one post from Dec. 27, 2020.

Ten days later, as rioters stormed the Capitol, the ProPublica/Post analysis shows, Facebook began taking down groups at a rate not seen since before the election. An internal Facebook spreadsheet from Jan. 6, which was included in Haugen’s disclosures, contains a section called “Action Items.” The top bullet point was a direction to conduct a “Sweep of Groups with V&I risk” — a term referring to violence and incitement. It had been 35 days since the Civic Integrity team, and with it the Group Task Force, had been disbanded.

Groups Still Active Long After Jan. 6

Months after the Capitol was breached, Facebook still was working to remove hundreds of political groups that violated company policies.

One of those was Smith’s United Conservatives for America, which continued to carry posts attacking the legitimacy of Biden’s election until Facebook removed it in May.

When Smith met with a reporter in his home in early December, he’d just finished a 30-day posting ban on Facebook. In spite of his account’s history of violations, he was still managing at least one Facebook group — also called United Conservatives for America.

Like its predecessor, the new United Conservatives for America group was racking up strikes for violations of Facebook’s rules, according to a post Smith made to the group in September.

That post included a screenshot of an automated message from Facebook informing him that eight recent posts in the new United Conservatives for America group had been flagged by fact-checkers. As a result, the distribution of his group’s posts was being limited.

Smith remained defiant.

“I'm Not Blaming Our Members,” Smith wrote. “I’m Blaming FakeBook!”

In late December, after being asked about Smith’s account and group, Facebook said it banned his profile and removed United Conservatives for America, citing unspecified violations of its community standards.

Methodology...

https://theconversation.com/facebook-whistleblower-frances-haugen-testified-that-the-companys-algorithms-are-dangerous-heres-how-they-can-manipulate-you-169420

Fo:{rmer Facebook product manager Frances Haugen testified before the U.S. Senate on Oct. 5, 2021, that the company’s social media platforms “} harm children, stoke division and weaken our democracy :{.”:(style="background-color:#ffffff;"/maxresdefault.jpg):{.”}:

Haugen was the primary source for a Wall Street Journal exposé on the company. She called Facebook’s algorithms dangerous, said Facebook executives were aware of the threat but put profits before people, and called on Congress to regulate the company.

Social media platforms rely heavily on people’s behavior to decide on the content that you see. In particular, they watch for content that people respond to or “engage” with by liking, commenting and sharing. Troll farms, organizations that spread provocative content, exploit this by copying high-engagement content and posting it as their own, which helps them reach a wide audience.

As a computer scientist who studies the ways large numbers of people interact using technology, I understand the logic of using the wisdom of the crowds in these algorithms. I also see substantial pitfalls in how the social media companies do so in practice.

From lions on the savanna to likes on Facebook

The concept of the wisdom of crowds assumes that using signals from others’ actions, opinions and preferences as a guide will lead to sound decisions. For example, collective predictions are normally more accurate than individual ones. Collective intelligence is used to predict financial markets, sports, elections and even disease outbreaks.

Throughout millions of years of evolution, these principles have been coded into the human brain in the form of cognitive biases that come with names like familiarity, mere exposure and bandwagon effect. If everyone starts running, you should also start running; maybe someone saw a lion coming and running could save your life. You may not know why, but it’s wiser to ask questions later.

Your brain picks up clues from the environment – including your peers – and uses simple rules to quickly translate those signals into decisions: Go with the winner, follow the majority, copy your neighbor. These rules work remarkably well in typical situations because they are based on sound assumptions. For example, they assume that people often act rationally, it is unlikely that many are wrong, the past predicts the future, and so on.

Technology allows people to access signals from much larger numbers of other people, most of whom they do not know. Artificial intelligence applications make heavy use of these popularity or “engagement” signals, from selecting search engine results to recommending music and videos, and from suggesting friends to ranking posts on news feeds.

Not everything viral deserves to be

Our research shows that virtually all web technology platforms, such as social media and news recommendation systems, have a strong popularity bias. When applications are driven by cues like engagement rather than explicit search engine queries, popularity bias can lead to harmful unintended consequences.

Social media like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and TikTok rely heavily on AI algorithms to rank and recommend content. These algorithms take as input what you like, comment on and share – in other words, content you engage with. The goal of the algorithms is to maximize engagement by finding out what people like and ranking it at the top of their feeds.

A primer on the Facebook algorithm.[vid?]

On the surface this seems reasonable. If people like credible news, expert opinions and fun videos, these algorithms should identify such high-quality content. But the wisdom of the crowds makes a key assumption here: that recommending what is popular will help high-quality content “bubble up.”

We tested this assumption by studying an algorithm that ranks items using a mix of quality and popularity. We found that in general, popularity bias is more likely to lower the overall quality of content. The reason is that engagement is not a reliable indicator of quality when few people have been exposed to an item. In these cases, engagement generates a noisy signal, and the algorithm is likely to amplify this initial noise. Once the popularity of a low-quality item is large enough, it will keep getting amplified.

Algorithms aren’t the only thing affected by engagement bias – it can affect people too. Evidence shows that information is transmitted via “complex contagion,” meaning the more times people are exposed to an idea online, the more likely they are to adopt and reshare it. When social media tells people an item is going viral, their cognitive biases kick in and translate into the irresistible urge to pay attention to it and share it.

Not-so-wise crowds

We recently ran an experiment using a news literacy app called Fakey. It is a game developed by our lab that simulates a news feed like those of Facebook and Twitter. Players see a mix of current articles from fake news, junk science, hyperpartisan and conspiratorial sources, as well as mainstream sources. They get points for sharing or liking news from reliable sources and for flagging low-credibility articles for fact-checking.

We found that players are more likely to like or share and less likely to flag articles from low-credibility sources when players can see that many other users have engaged with those articles. Exposure to the engagement metrics thus creates a vulnerability.

The wisdom of the crowds fails because it is built on the false assumption that the crowd is made up of diverse, independent sources. There may be several reasons this is not the case.

First, because of people’s tendency to associate with similar people, their online neighborhoods are not very diverse. The ease with which social media users can unfriend those with whom they disagree pushes people into homogeneous communities, often referred to as echo chambers.

Second, because many people’s friends are friends of one another, they influence one another. A famous experiment demonstrated that knowing what music your friends like affects your own stated preferences. Your social desire to conform distorts your independent judgment.

Third, popularity signals can be gamed. Over the years, search engines have developed sophisticated techniques to counter so-called “link farms” and other schemes to manipulate search algorithms. Social media platforms, on the other hand, are just beginning to learn about their own vulnerabilities.

People aiming to manipulate the information market have created fake accounts, like trolls and social bots, and organized fake networks. They have flooded the network to create the appearance that a conspiracy theory or a political candidate is popular, tricking both platform algorithms and people’s cognitive biases at once. They have even altered the structure of social networks to create illusions about majority opinions.

Dialing down engagement

What to do? Technology platforms are currently on the defensive. They are becoming more aggressive during elections in taking down fake accounts and harmful misinformation. But these efforts can be akin to a game of whack-a-mole.

A different, preventive approach would be to add friction. In other words, to slow down the process of spreading information. High-frequency behaviors such as automated liking and sharing could be inhibited by CAPTCHA tests, which require a human to respond, or fees. Not only would this decrease opportunities for manipulation, but with less information people would be able to pay more attention to what they see. It would leave less room for engagement bias to affect people’s decisions.

It would also help if social media companies adjusted their algorithms to rely less on engagement signals and more on quality signals to determine the content they serve you. Perhaps the whistleblower revelations will provide the necessary impetus.

https://www.cnet.com/how-to/the-facebook-papers-how-to-read-the-reports/

...Here's a list of articles and videos on the Facebook Papers from a collection of news outlets that have seen the internal documents. Note that some of the articles may require a subscription to read.

The Associated Press

Facebook froze as anti-vaccine comments swarmed users, Oct. 26
Facebook language gaps weaken screening of hate, terrorism, Oct. 25
Apple once threatened Facebook ban over Mideast maid abuse, Oct. 25
People or profit? Facebook papers show deep conflict within, Oct. 25
Facebook dithered in curbing divisive user content in India, Oct. 24
Amid the Capitol riot, Facebook faced its own insurrection, Oct. 22

The Atlantic

'History Will Not Judge Us Kindly,' Oct. 25
How Facebook Failed the World, Oct. 25
What Happened When Facebook Became Boomerbook, Oct. 5

Bloomberg

CBS

-, Oct. 3

CNBC

The Facebook Papers: Documents reveal internal fury and dissent over site's policies, Oct. 25

CNN

The Financial Times

Fox Business

NBC

The New York Times

NPR

Politico

Reuters

Facebook knew about, failed to police, abusive content globally - documents, Oct. 25

USA Today

The Wall Street Journal

The Washington Post

The Verge

The tier list: How Facebook decides which countries need protection, Oct. 25
Facebook's lost generation, Oct. 25

Wired

Facebook is Everywhere; Its Moderation is Nowhere Close, Oct. 25
How to Fix Facebook, According to Facebook Employees, Oct. 25
Facebook Failed the People who Tried to Improve It, Oct. 25

The story of Carol and Karen: Two experimental Facebook accounts show how the company helped divide America

Jessica Guynn and Kevin McCoy, USA TODAY

October 25, 2021·

In 2019, two users joined Facebook. Both had similar interests: young children and parenting, Christianity, civics and community.

"Carol," 41, was a conservative from North Carolina. She was interested in news, politics, then-President Donald Trump and the nation's first family. She followed the official accounts for Trump, first lady Melania Trump and Fox News.

"Karen" was the same age and lived in the same state. But she was a liberal who liked politics, news and Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. She disliked Trump. She followed a local news site, pages about North Carolina and the liberal advocacy group MoveOn.

Facebook's algorithms got to work, suggesting what they'd be interested in.

Accepting recommendations for sites supportive of Trump led Carol to suggestions for a site called “Donald Trump is Jesus,” and another for QAnon, a wide-ranging extremist ideology that alleges celebrities and top Democrats are engaged in a pedophile ring. Karen was presented with anti-Trump pages, including one that posted an image showing an anus instead of Trump's mouth.

The two women were not real. They were created by a Facebook researcher to explore how the social media platform deepened political divides in the U.S. by recommending content rife with misinformation and extremism.

Live updates: More on Facebook papers and the whistleblower testimony in the UK]

The experiment shows that Facebook, which had 2.9 billion monthly active users as of June 30, knew before the 2020 presidential election that its automated recommendations amplified misinformation and polarization in the U.S., yet the company largely failed to curtail its role in deepening the political divide.

Reports describing the experiments are among hundreds of documents disclosed to the Securities and Exchange Commission and provided to Congress in redacted form by attorneys for Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee. The redacted versions were obtained by a consortium of 17 news organizations, including USA TODAY.

More: Facebook says it removes hate speech. Its own research says otherwise.]

In the summer of 2019, a Facebook researcher created two fictitious accounts with similar demographics but opposite political beliefs. Facebook's recommendation algorithm quickly suggested the users follow accounts on extreme ends of the political spectrum.

Jose Rocha said he's experienced the divisiveness firsthand.

A military veteran who grew up in a Democratic, pro-union family in Selah, Washington, Rocha said Facebook normalized racist views and led him down a rabbit hole to far-right ideologies.

For a time, Rocha said, he became a Nazi sympathizer and a backer of other extremist views – behavior he now blames on Facebook's recommendations system.

"I wouldn't have even known they existed if it wasn't for Facebook. So I wouldn't have went out seeking them," said Rocha, 27.

Bill Navari, 57, a conservative sports commentator from Pittsburgh, said a cousin blocked him on Facebook after he suggested she get her TDS ("Trump derangement syndrome") checked.

“I’ve seen people on Facebook saying, ‘If you are voting for Trump, unfriend me.' But I didn’t see anyone saying, ‘If you are voting for Biden, unfriend me,'” he said. “Facebook has become like oil and water, and never the two shall meet.”

These days, he steers clear of political debates on Facebook.

“I’ll post pics of my family, of my dog, where we went on vacation, and I stay in touch with the friends and family. But posting a meme or putting something on Facebook, it’s not going to change anyone’s mind,” he said. “I just think the conversation has become so coarse.”

Is Facebook to blame? “I don’t like pointing fingers without direct knowledge,” he said. “But I do think that Facebook is a party to this.”

The internal Facebook documents show how swiftly the platform's recommendation algorithms can amplify polarization by sending users to content full of misinformation and extremism.

The company's experiment with the hypothetical conservative user was called "Carol's Journey to QAnon." Within five days of going live on June 2, 2019, the user was barraged by "extreme, conspiratorial and graphic content," the researcher wrote.

One of the recommendations included an image labeling former President Barack Obama a "traitor" with a caption that read, "When we're done he'll claim Kenyan citizenship as a way to escape." (Despite racist claims to the contrary, Obama is a U.S. citizen.)

The report on the fictitious liberal user was called "Karen and the Echo Chamber of Reshares." That account went live on July 20, 2019. Within a week, Facebook's recommendations pivoted to "all anti-Trump content." Some recommendations came from a small Facebook group that had been flagged for "promoting illegal activity," the Facebook researcher wrote.

One image served to Karen showed then-first lady Melania Trump's face superimposed on the body of a bikini-clad woman kneeling on a bed. The caption read, "Melania Trump: Giving evangelicals something they can get behind."

Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen appears before the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Subcommittee at the Russell Senate Office Building on October 05, 2021, in Washington, D.C. Haugen left Facebook in May and provided internal company documents about Facebook to journalists and others, alleging that Facebook consistently chooses profits over safety.

Haugen, the former Facebook employee who has blown the whistle on the company, is a former product manager who worked on Facebook’s Civic Integrity team, focusing on elections. She had a front-row seat to the most divisive political events in recent memory, including the Jan. 6 insurrection in which Trump supporters tried to block Congress from certifying Joe Biden's win in the presidential election.

Concerned that Facebook was prioritizing profits over the well-being of its users, Haugen reviewed thousands of documents over several weeks before leaving the company in May.

The documents, some of which have been the subject of extensive reporting by The Wall Street Journal and CBS News' "60 Minutes," detail company research showing that toxic and divisive content is prevalent in posts boosted by Facebook and shared widely by users....

an 1021 no lnx

America is sleepwalking towards fascism

Amanda Marcotte and Salon October 08, 2021

AT&T and Facebook are unaccountable. Donald Trump's still free. This week saw an overwhelming number of stories all pointing to the same conclusion: American authoritarianism is on the rise, juiced and protected by some of the richest and most powerful people in the United States.

Due to a combination of whistleblowers, investigations, and, in many cases, utter shamelessness on the part of fascism enablers, this is now out in the open. And yet, despite Democrats controlling both Congress and the White House, serious action to fight back and save American democracy remains underwhelming to nonexistent.

The Senate Judiciary Committee, for instance, released a sobering report this week detailing the extent of Donald Trump's efforts to force the Department of Justice to fabricate evidence for use as a pretext to nullify the 2020 election. The report details nine separate instances of Trump pressuring acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen to enact a scheme, concocted by another DOJ lawyer named Jeffrey Clark, to overturn the election. Trump was not exactly subtle about what he expected from Rosen. On January 3 — three days before Trump resorted to inciting violence in a last-ditch effort to overthrow the election — Trump called a meeting and opened it by complaining, "One thing we know is you, Rosen, aren't going to do anything to overturn the election."

As Heather "Digby" Parton writes at Salon, "The president of the United States tried for weeks to get the Attorney General to overturn the election. That is the definition of an attempted coup."

Senate Republicans are defending Trump on the grounds that this effort failed, which, as I point out in today's Standing Room Only newsletter, is the equivalent of saying attempted murder isn't a real crime. And the reason they're defending him is not mysterious. He's going to run again in 2024 — and will try to steal the election again, as well — and he does so with the full support of the GOP establishment, which is manipulating state election laws to make it easier for Trump next time.

This week, as well, Reuters published a disturbing report exposing how One America News, which can aptly be described as an authoritarian propaganda channel supporting Trump's demands to be installed illegally as president, is being bankrolled by the communications giant AT&T.

OAN's founder, Robert Herring Sr., not only claims that OAN was started at the request of AT&T executives but that court records show "AT&T has been a crucial source of funds flowing into OAN, providing tens of millions of dollars in revenue." AT&T defends this by saying they offer "many news channels that offer viewpoints across the political spectrum," but of course, OAN is not "news," because they heavily supported false claims that the 2020 election was fraudulent. OAN is profiting handsomely from Trump's insurrection, as the "network's online audience soared in November after conservative mainstay and OAN competitor Fox News affirmed Joe Biden's victory."

Fascist propaganda, it turns out, is very good business indeed. This ugly reality, that there's money to be made in elevating false, authoritarian propaganda, was also highlighted in the rolling news stories this week around Facebook, stemming from the revelations offered by whistleblower Frances Haugen.

Haugen collected thousands of documents during her time working for the civic integrity department at Facebook, which she says was marginalized precisely because having civic integrity is not good for profit. Haugen's documentation demonstrated what many have long suspected based on public evidence: Facebook knows that right-wingers are using their platform to spread disinformation and undermine democracy. They just don't care because authoritarian disinformation is wildly popular and therefore good for business.

This is why the right is freaking out and spreading conspiracy theories to discredit Haugen. They depend heavily on Facebook to distribute their false, inflammatory propaganda, and without it, their efforts to undermine democracy would lose a lot of power.

These stories are all troubling. The situation is clear-cut. There's a powerful authoritarian leader gunning to destroy democracy and install himself as the nation's leader. He has not just the full support of a major political party and the political power to arrange the laws to make this happen for him, but a propaganda apparatus that touches every corner of American life. Corporate interests may front like they oppose this, but behind the scenes, they offer material support to fascists because they see doing so as profitable. None of this is a secret.

And yet ... nothing substantive is being done.

The Senate Judiciary released a report detailing Trump's extensive efforts to overthrow democracy, and yet there's not a whiff of a hint that there's any movement from the Department of Justice to hold him criminally accountable for his actions. On the contrary, the DOJ is helping Trump, by shielding his Justice Department appointees from being questioned by congressional investigators. The assault on free and fair elections on the state level has been thoroughly documented, but legislation that would prevent these anti-democratic actions is moribund in a Democratic-controlled Congress because a couple of Democratic senators prioritize the filibuster over democracy itself. Democrats control some of the most powerful offices in the land, and yet they act helpless to stop the ongoing coup effort being conducted by a private citizen in Florida who has a criminal rap sheet many times longer than should be necessary to put him away for years.

There curiously has also been no accountability for the corporate interests who support rising fascism because it's in their financial interests to do so.

Haugen's whistleblowing efforts focused heavily on attempts to expose Facebook's role in spreading right-wing disinformation, but when she was brought up for a Senate hearing, it was to talk about teen girls and self-esteem, a problem even the Insurrectionist Caucus is happy to pull faces and claim to be upset by. It's an important issue, to be sure, but in the face of the literal end to American democracy, it's questionable whether teen self-esteem should be the main priority for the Senate when it comes to Facebook.

There's just no way out of it. The country is sleepwalking its way into an authoritarian overthrow of democracy.

There's plenty of journalism and exposés on all of these social forces Trump is exploiting to capture the White House in 2024. Yet, despite all of the noise, there's little in the way of action to change things. But it doesn't have to be this way.

Democrats have real power, and even if a couple of no-good centrist Democrats are standing in the way of electoral reform, there are surely other actions that could be taken to stop Trump. A lack of imagination and political cowardice, however, is inducing this attitude of helplessness in Democrats. And it's one that Trump will all too easily exploit to get his way.

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