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The documents, and the stories based on them, raised concerns about the potential real-world harms from Facebook’s various platforms. They also offer insight into the inner workings of the company, including its approach to misinformation and hate speech moderation, both in the US and internationally, as well as employee reactions to concerns about company decisions.
Facebook has repeatedly tried to discredit Haugen and said reports on the documents mischaracterize its actions. “At the heart of these stories is a premise which is false,” a Facebook spokesperson previously 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.”
Here are some key quotes from the documents provided so far.
Vaccine misinformation
A Facebook spokesperson said the company has made improvement on the issues raised in the internal memos.
Human trafficking
According to one internal report from January 2020 entitled “Domestic Servitude and Labor Trafficking in the Middle East,” a Facebook investigation found the following: “Our platform enables all three stages of the human exploitation lifecycle (recruitment, facilitation, exploitation) via complex real-world networks. … The traffickers, recruiters and facilitators from these ‘agencies’ used FB [Facebook] profiles, IG [Instagram] profiles, Pages, Messenger and WhatsApp.”
A Facebook spokesperson told CNN: “We prohibit human exploitation in no uncertain terms.” The spokesperson said it has “been combatting human trafficking on our platform for many years.”
The algorithm’s impact
Facebook told CNN the introduction of the metric wasn’t a “sea change” in how the company ranked users’ activity on the social network as it previously considered likes, comments, and shares as part of its ranking.
Gaps in international coverage
In a public statement addressing reports concerning the leaked research, Facebook said, “We have an industry-leading process for reviewing and prioritizing countries with the highest risk of offline harm and violence, every six months. When we respond to a crisis, we deploy country-specific support as needed.”