Posts spread more easily if they included outrage or misinformation, causing an online “social-civil war” abroad in places like Poland. A change to Facebook’s news feed in 2018 intended to bring friends and family members closer together in meaningful ways often had the opposite effect, internal researchers wrote.Joel Kaplan, Facebook’s global head of public policy, has repeatedly defended his influence, saying he pushes for analytical and methodological rigor about subjects such as the algorithms that power Facebook products. Employees complain that sometimes that is because Facebook’s Washington-based policy team has veto power over decisions. ![]() The company spends considerable time and resources studying how to solve such problems, but has declined in some cases to implement potential solutions put forward by its own researchers.“But the thing that I think we should be discussing is what role, what choices did Facebook make to expose the public to greater risk than was necessary?” They didn’t invent ethnic violence,” Haugen said in a call with reporters this month. In the letters, she also offered her help to the SEC if it were to investigate potential violations of securities laws.īut more broadly, Haugen has kick-started a debate about Facebook’s impact on society, both in the U.S. She wrote at least eight separate letters, and her attorneys provided the internal documents to the SEC in support of her allegation that executives’ statements don’t match the truth. Haugen alleges in letters to the SEC Office of the Whistleblower that Facebook executives up to and including CEO Mark Zuckerberg have misled investors for years, giving them a false picture of the reality inside the company about subjects like Facebook’s user base and its record on human rights. The Wall Street Journal reported some of the disclosures earlier. The news consortium is making at least some of the disclosures public beginning Monday. Most of the documents are digital photographs of company material on computer screens. Digital versions of the disclosures - with some names and other personal information redacted - were obtained by a consortium of news organizations, including NBC News. The documents were included in disclosures made to the Securities and Exchange Commission, or SEC, and provided to Congress in redacted form by legal counsel for Frances Haugen, who worked as a Facebook product manager until May and has come forward as a whistleblower. Some employees defended management, with one calling Facebook executives “brilliant, data-driven futurists like many of us.” ![]() Many tried to figure out how to turn stalled bureaucratic wheels and steer a company that now has so many departments that employees sometimes aren’t aware of overlapping responsibilities. ![]() The documents show employees - many who were hired to help Facebook address problems on its platforms - debating with one another on internal message boards free of public relations spin. They are a small fraction of the internal communications over the past several years at Facebook, where employee message boards that started as a way to embrace transparency have become an outlet for reflection and advocacy on the impact of social media. Together the documents offer the deepest look provided to outsiders at the internal workings of the world’s largest social media company. ![]() The comments are in thousands of pages of internal Facebook documents given to NBC News detailing Facebook’s internal debates around the societal impact of its platforms.
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