January 6 insurrection and Facebook: Internal docs paint a damning picture

By Adam

SME asked Sandberg about her quote and whether she stood firm behind it. A Facebook spokesperson responded that Sandberg’s quote was contextualized. The spokesperson stated that Jan. 6 was a large-scale online event, and included Facebook’s platforms.

Haugen’s main allegations about the company center on the attack on Capitol. She claims that Facebook misled investors, the public and the SEC about its role in perpetuating misinformation.

The Wall Street Journal first published leaked documents from Haugen earlier this year. The Facebook Files, the ongoing series of reports published by The Wall Street Journal, revealed many secrets that caught the attention of lawmakers from around the world.

Facebook denies the premise behind Haugen’s conclusions. Haugen claims that he has cherry-picked documents to give an unfair portrayal.

“Those who attacked the Capitol and those who encouraged them are responsible for the violence that occurred January 6. We took steps to limit the content that attempted to delegitimize this election, including labeling candidate posts with the latest vote count after Mr. Trump prematurely declared his victory, pausing political advertising and removing #StopTheStealGroup in November,” Andy Stone, a Facebook spokesperson, told SME Friday.

“After the violence at Capitol erupted, and as we saw continued attempts of organizing events to dispute the result of the presidential election outcome, we removed content with the phrase “stop the steal” under our Coordinating Harm Policy and suspended Trump from our platform.

Facebook published a blog posting by Guy Rosen (its vice president of Integrity) on Friday night about its efforts in 2020.

“Our enforcement was patchy”

Haugen included an internal analysis of the spread of the Stop the Steal movement and Patriot Party movements on Facebook. This analysis was first reported earlier this year by BuzzFeed News.

“Hindsight” is the author of the analysis. They are not identifiable from the information provided.[A]It was hard to tell at the time if what we were seeing was a concerted effort to delegitimize an election or whether it was protected expression by users who were afraid and confused. It is important to look back at the history of the election delegitimizing movements that grew, spread conspiracies, and incited the Capitol insurrection.

The analysis showed that the policies, procedures, and processes Facebook had in place were simply inadequate to slow or halt the “meteoric,” growth of Stop the Steal. The analysis revealed that Facebook treated Stop the Steal content and people or groups as an individual rather than as a whole. This led to dire results.

The analysis states that “almost all of the fastest-growing FB Groups were Stop the Steal” during their peak growth. We were able to remove individual Pages and Groups only after they had exceeded a certain violation threshold. This was because we looked at each entity separately, not as a whole. We were unable act on simple objects like comments or posts because they were all prone to violating, …read more

Source:: Social Media Explorer