[News] Not stopping 'Stop the Steal:' Facebook Papers paint damning picture of company's role in insurrection

[AMAL]

"We know this was organized online. We know that," she said in an interview with Reuters. "We... took down QAnon, Proud Boys, Stop the Steal, anything that was talking about possible violence last week. Our enforcement's never perfect so I'm sure there were still things on Facebook. I think these events were largely organized on platforms that don't have our abilities to stop hate and don't have our standards and don't have our transparency." But internal Facebook (FB) documents reviewed by CNN suggest otherwise. The documents, including an internal post-mortem and one document showing in real time countermeasures Facebook employees were belatedly implementing, paint a picture of a company that was in fact fundamentally unprepared for how the Stop the Steal movement used its platform to organize, and that only truly swung into action after the movement had turned violent. Asked by CNN about Sandberg's quote and whether she stood by it, a Facebook spokesperson pointed to the greater context around Sandberg's quote. She had been noting that Jan. 6 organization happened largely online, including but not limited to on Facebook's platforms, the spokesperson said. The documents were provided by Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen as evidence to support disclosures she made to the Securities and Exchange Commission and provided to Congress in redacted form by Haugen's legal counsel. The redacted versions were obtained by a consortium of 17 US news organizations, including CNN. One of Haugen's central allegations about the company focuses on the attack on the Capitol. In a SEC disclosure she alleges, "Facebook misled investors and the public about its role perpetuating misinformation and violent extremism relating to the 2020 election and January 6th insurrection." Facebook denies the premise of Haugen's conclusions and says Haugen has cherry-picked documents to present an unfair portrayal of the company.

"Hindsight is 20:20," the author or authors of the analysis, who are not identifiable from what was provided, write. "[A]t the time it was very difficult to know whether what we were seeing was a coordinated effort to delegitimize the election, or whether it was protected free expression by users who were afraid and confused and deserved our empathy. But hindsight being 20:20 makes it all the more important to look back to learn what we can about the growth of the election delegitimatizing movements that grew, spread conspiracy, and helped incite the Capitol insurrection." The analysis found that the policies and procedures Facebook had in place were simply not up to the task of slowing, much less halting, the "meteoric" growth of Stop the Steal. For instance, those behind the analysis noted that Facebook treated each piece of content and person or group within Stop the Steal individually, rather than as part of a whole, with dire results. "Almost all of the fastest growing FB Groups were Stop the Steal during their peak growth," the analysis says. "Because we were looking at each entity individually, rather than as a cohesive movement, we were only able to take down individual Groups and Pages once they exceeded a violation threshold. We were not able to act on simple objects like posts and comments because they individually tended not to violate, even if they were surrounded by hate, violence, and misinformation." This approach did eventually change, according to the analysis -- after it was too late. "After the Capitol insurrection and a wave of Storm the Capitol events across the country, we realized that the individual delegitimizing Groups, Pages, and slogans did constitute a cohesive movement," the analysis says. This was not the only way in which Facebook had failed to anticipate something like Stop the Steal, or in which its response was lacking. Facebook has for some time now had a policy banning "coordinated inauthentic behavior" on its platforms. This ban allows it to take action against, for instance, the Russian troll army that worked to interfere with the 2016 US election through accounts and pages set up to look as if they were American But, the analysis notes with emphasis, the company had "little policy around coordinated authentic harm" -- that is, little to stop people organizing under their real names and not hiding their intention to get the country to reject the results of the election. Stop the Steal and Patriot Party groups "were not directly mobilizing offline harm, nor were they directly promoting militarization," the analysis says. "Instead, they were amplifying and normalizing misinformation and violent hate in a way that delegitimized a free and fair democratic election. The harm existed at the network level: an individual's speech is protected, but as a movement, it normalized delegitimization and hate in a way that resulted in offline harm and harm to the norms underpinning democracy."

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2021/10/22/business/january-6-insurrection-facebook-papers/index.html