New York (CNN Business)Facebook has confronted whistleblowers, PR firestorms and Congressional inquiries in recent years. But now it faces a combination of all three at once in what could be the most intense and wide-ranging crisis in the company's 17-year history.
On Friday, a consortium of 17 US news organizations began publishing a series of stories — collectively called "The Facebook Papers" —
based on a trove of hundreds of internal company documents which were
included in disclosures made to the Securities and Exchange Commission
and provided to Congress in redacted form by Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen's legal counsel. The consortium, which includes CNN, reviewed the redacted versions received by Congress.
CNN's coverage includes stories about how coordinated groups on Facebook (FB) sow discord and violence, including on January 6,
as well as Facebook's challenges moderating content in some
non-English-speaking countries, and how human traffickers have used its
platforms to exploit people.
The
reports from CNN, and the other outlets that are part of the
consortium, follow a month of intense scrutiny for the company. The Wall
Street Journal previously published a series of stories based on tens
of thousands of pages of internal Facebook documents leaked by Haugen.
(The consortium's work is based on many of the same documents.)
The publication of the Journal's "Facebook Files," which raised concerns about the impact of Instagram on teen girls, among other issues, prompted a Senate subcomittee hearing with Facebook head of global safety Antigone Davis. Haugen herself then testified before the Senate subcommittee, during which she said she believes that "Facebook's products harm children, stoke division, and weaken our democracy."
There's currently no end in sight for Facebook's troubles. Members of the subcommittee have called for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to testify. And on Friday, another former Facebook employee anonymously filed a complaint against the company to the SEC, with allegations similar to Haugen's.
Facebook has dealt with scandals over its approach to data privacy,
content moderation and competitors before. But the vast trove of
documents, and the many stories surely still to come from it, touch on
concerns and problems across seemingly every part of its business: its
approach to combatting hate speech and misinformation, managing
international growth, protecting younger users on its platform and even
its ability to accurately measure the size of its massive audience.
All
of this raises an uncomfortable question for the company: Is Facebook
actually capable of managing the potential for real-world harms from its
staggeringly large platforms, or has the social media giant become too
big not to fail?
Facebook tries to turn the page
Facebook,
for its part, has repeatedly tried to discredit Haugen, and said her
testimony and reports on the documents mischaracterize its actions and
efforts.
"At
the heart of these stories is a premise which is false," a Facebook
spokesperson said in a statement to CNN. "Yes, we're a business and we
make profit, but the idea that we do so at the expense of people's
safety or wellbeing misunderstands where our own commercial interests
lie."
In a tweet thread
last week, the company's Vice President of Communications, John
Pinette, called the Facebook Papers a "curated selection out of millions
of documents at Facebook" which "can in no way be used to draw fair
conclusions about us." But even that response is telling --— if Facebook
has more documents that would tell a fuller story, why not release
them? (During her Senate testimony Facebook's Davis said Facebook is "looking for ways to release more research.")
A
trove of internal Facebook documents leaked by whistleblower Frances
Haugen has kicked off a wave of coverage of the company, starting with
the Wall Street Journal's "Facebook Files" and now as a consortium of
other news organizations roll out stories on the same documents.
Instead, Facebook is now reportedly planning to rebrand
itself under a new name as early as this week, as the wave of critical
coverage continues. (Facebook previously declined to comment on this
report.) The move appears to be a clear attempt to turn the page, but a
fresh coat of paint won't fix the underlying issues outlined in the
documents — only Facebook, or whatever it may soon be called, can do
that.
Take the example of a report published by the Journal
on September 16 that highlighted internal Facebook research about a
violent Mexican drug cartel, known as Cartél Jalisco Nueva Generación.
The cartel was said to be using the platform to post violent content and
recruit new members using the acronym "CJNG," even though it had been
designated internally as one of the "Dangerous Individuals and
Organizations" whose content should be removed. Facebook told the
Journal at the time that it was investing in artificial intelligence to
bolster its enforcement against such groups.
Despite
the Journal's report last month, CNN last week identified disturbing
content linked to the group on Instagram, including photos of guns, and
photo and video posts in which people appear to have been shot or
beheaded. After CNN asked Facebook about the posts, a spokesperson
confirmed that multiple videos CNN flagged were removed for violating
the company's policies, and at least one post had a warning added.
Haugen has suggested Facebook's failure to fix such problems is in part because it prioritizes profit over societal good, and, in some cases, because the company lacks the capacity to put out its many fires at once.
"Facebook
is extremely thinly staffed ... and this is because there are a lot of
technologists that look at what Facebook has done and their
unwillingness to accept responsibility, and people just aren't willing
to work there," Haugen said in a briefing with the "Facebook Papers"
consortium last week. "So they have to make very, very, very intentional
choices on what does or doesn't get accomplished."
Facebook
has invested a total of $13 billion since 2016 to improve the safety of
its platforms, according to the company spokesperson. (By comparison,
the company's annual revenue topped $85 billion last year and its profit
hit $29 billion.) The spokesperson also said Facebook has "40,000
people working on the safety and security on our platform, including
15,000 people who review content in more than 70 languages working in
more than 20 locations all across the world to support our community."
"We
have also taken down over 150 networks seeking to manipulate public
debate since 2017, and they have originated in over 50 countries, with
the majority coming from or focused outside of the US," the spokesperson
said. "Our track record shows that we crack down on abuse outside the
US with the same intensity that we apply in the US."
Still,
the documents suggest that the company has much more work to do to
eliminate all of the many harms outlined in the documents, and to
address the unintended consequences of Facebook's unprecedented reach
and integration into our daily lives.
An uncertain future
In
the meantime, the company appears to be quickly losing trust — not only
among some of its users and regulators, but internally, as well.
Several
of the internal documents point to concerns among Facebook employees
about the company's actions, including one December 2020 post on
Facebook's internal site about attrition on the company's integrity team
in which an employee notes in a comment, "Our recent Pulse results show
confidence in leadership has declined across the company." (Pulse
surveys are often used by companies to gauge employee sentiment on
certain topics.)
The
internal post came after Facebook's Civic Integrity team was broken up
following the Presidential election and its staff assigned to other
roles within the company, a move that Haugen criticized but that
Facebook Vice President of Integrity Guy Rosen has said
was done "so that the incredible work pioneered [by the team] for
elections could be applied even further ... their work continues to this
day."
And on Thursday, Facebook's independent oversight board accused the company
of not being "fully forthcoming" on the details of its Cross-Check
program that reportedly shielded millions of VIP users from the social
media platform's normal content moderation rules.
(A Facebook spokesperson said in a statement that the company had
"asked the board for input into our Cross-Check system, and we will
strive to be clearer in our explanations to them going forward.")
The
good news for Facebook: Haugen, and the team supporting her, aren't
aiming to shut down or break up the company. During her Senate
testimony, Haugen repeatedly told lawmakers that she was there because
she believes in Facebook's potential for good, if the company is able to
address its serious issues. Haugen even said she would work for
Facebook again, if given the chance. She suggested that Congress give
the company the chance to "declare moral bankruptcy and we can figure
out how to fix these things together."
"The
most interesting thing I discovered as I read these documents is how
extraordinary the company is," Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard Law School
professor and strategic legal adviser to Haugen, told CNN. "The company
is filled with thousands of thousands of Frances Haugens ... who are
just trying to do their job. They are trying to make Facebook safe and
useful and the best platform for communication that they can."
What
remains to be seen is how much Facebook will change in response to the
revelations from current and future whistleblowers, especially if its
advertising-fueled business continues to chug along unimpeded, as it has
so far. Will it agree to the kind of transparency and cooperation that
Haugen, regulators and others have called for? Or will it simply
continue with business as usual under a new name?
This
article is part of a CNN series published on "The Facebook Papers," a
trove of over ten thousand pages of leaked internal Facebook documents
that give deep insight into the company's internal culture, its approach
to misinformation and hate speech moderation, internal research on its
newsfeed algorithm, communication related to Jan. 6, and more. You can read the entire series here.
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