Alex Shephard/October 25, 2021
Facebook Is Even Worse Than Anyone Imagined
A trove of internal documents reveal a company that is willfully spreading misinformation and hate in pursuit of profit and growth.
https://newrepublic.com/article/164142/f...n-beyond-repair


Speaking to Recode earlier this year, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg made his case for Facebook. “I think if you look at the grand arc here, what’s really happening is individuals are getting more power and more opportunity to create the lives and the jobs that they want,” Zuckerberg told Casey Newton. “And to connect with people they want. And to connect to the ideas that they want and to share the ideas that they want. And I just think that that will lead to a better world. It will be different from the world that we had before. I think it will be more diverse, I think more different ideas and models will be able to exist.”

But Zuckerberg suggested that a problem remained. By empowering individuals, Facebook was disrupting a hierarchy that had existed for generations: “My concern is that we’re too frequently telling the negative sides of it, from the perspective of the institutions that may be not on the winning side of these changes.” For the last several years, Facebook had been besieged by a narrative that its products were making the world an uglier and divisive place. Here, Zuckerberg inverted the critique: The real victims of Facebook’s rise weren’t its users but a number of dusty institutions that were raging as their power was being redistributed to the people. In this version of events, Facebook wasn’t just empowering its users, it was liberating them.

Over the last few days, that pretty little picture has taken a serious hit, as several news organizations have begun reporting out revelations from internal Facebook documents provided to them by whistleblower (and crypto enthusiast) Frances Haugen, who worked at the company for two years before leaving in May. These documents illuminate a Facebook that is the opposite of Zuckerberg’s rose-tinted view—a company that knowingly provides a product that is used to spread misinformation and hate; that is used to facilitate hate speech, terrorism, and sex trafficking; and whose meager efforts to stop these things have often failed—as they did, most notably, in the lead-up to the January 6 insurrection.

These are the most damning internal leaks from Facebook to come to light yet—more hair-raising than the revelations contained within Sheera Frenkel’s insider account, An Ugly Truth: Facebook’s Battle for Domination; perhaps even more damning than the Cambridge Analytica scandal that rocked the social network three years ago. These new disclosures reveal that Facebook executives know exactly what their product is doing to its users—and by extension, to the world—and are aware of the inadequacy of their halting efforts to mitigate these society-damaging impacts. In almost every instance, the company privileged its own profits, growth, and—in particular—its efforts to boost its anemic popularity with young people over the health and well-being of its user base.

“Time and again, [researchers at Facebook] determined that people misused-- excerpt, rest at link above --