The internal documents now known as The Facebook Papers, or Facebook Files, are a damning documentation of how the social media giant knowingly causes real world harm. Examples include measures to suppress hateful, deceptive content are lifted after the American presidential election in 2020, as the pro-Trump group “Stop the Steal,” which disputes the legitimacy of the election, experience “meteoric” growth. A dummy test account on Facebook in India is flooded with violent anti-Muslim propaganda - leading researchers to seeing more pictures of dead bodies than they have in their entire lives.
A trove of internal Facebook documents reveals that the social media giant has privately and meticulously tracked real-world harms exacerbated by its platforms, ignored warnings from its employees about the risks of their design and algorithmic decisions and exposed vulnerable communities around the world to dangerous content.
The Facebook Papers were leaked by Frances Haugen, a former data scientist at Facebook, who copied thousands of pages of internal documents and webpages before she left the company. Then she shared those materials with The Wall Street Journal, which began publishing stories about them last month under the heading “The Facebook Files.” Weeks later, she began to parcel the materials out to a variety of news organizations. The files have now come to be known as “The Facebook Papers,”
A mix of presentations, research studies, discussion threads and strategy memos, the Facebook Papers provide an unprecedented view into how executives at the social media giant weigh trade-offs between public safety and their own bottom line. Some of the documents were first reported by the Wall Street Journal.
Finally we’ll cover Facebooks rebrand to Meta - a hopeful shift in focus to the next technological frontier of AR / VR and Web3.
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