- Some people say that the problem is that
social networks are polarizing us,
but that's not at all clear from the evidence or research.
Others claim that algorithms feed us content
that makes us angry because it's good for business,
but that's not accurate either.
- "The Facebook Papers" are more than 10,000 documents
downloaded by an internal whistleblower at Facebook,
that really show, over and over and over again,
how Facebook is well aware of the harm
that its platform causes to society.
One of the big ones is around their failure
to control hate speech.
Another big one is that their algorithms
actually encourage polarization.
And then there's a good amount about their failures
on January 6th, during the insurrection.
Zuckerberg's public statements are in many ways at odds
with what the documents say, sometimes directly at odds,
and sometimes just the spirit of them seem to be in bad faith,
now that we have a much bigger picture
of what the company actually knew.
He publicly has said that the company takes down,
he believes, 94% of hate speech.
We see from the documents that its own researches
said that they are taking down
less than 5% of hate speech on the platform.
- Over the last few years,
we've gone from proactively identifying
and taking down about 20% of the hate speech on the service,
to now we are proactively identifying,
I think it's about 94% of the hate speech
that we end up taking down.
- He has said that the algorithms at Facebook
do not optimize for making people
spend more time on the platform.
In fact, its most key metric, meaningful social interactions,
is measuring things like,
"How many times will people reshare a document or a post?
How many time will people comment?"
- I've heard a lot of people say that we're optimizing
for keeping people on the service.
The way that we view this is that we are trying
to help people have meaningful social interactions.
But that's very different from setting up algorithms
in order to just kind of try to tweak and optimize
and get people to spend every last minute on our service,
which is not how we design the company or the services.
- Well, it turns out that their own studies show
that their algorithms cause a lot of polarization.
They were counting very closely
how much hate speech is on the platform,
how much misinformation is on the platform,
but they weren't publicly talking about that.
What they would say publicly
was, as CEO Mark Zuckerberg said,
"The jury is out about whether social-media platforms
cause polarization."
- We design our systems to show people
the content that's going to be the most meaningful to them,
which is not trying to be as divisive as possible.
- The overall picture we get is that Facebook
did not action on the many,
many dozens of suggestions to improve its platform,
because many of those suggestions
would have sacrificed growth,
they would have sacrificed key metrics,
like engagement, that Mark Zuckerberg really cares about,
and they would have had many false positives,
meaning they would have taken down
a lot of non-problematic comments by mistake.
And Zuckerberg and the leadership
were not willing to tolerate false positives.
That said, they have tons of false positives already,
but they weren't willing to tolerate more.
The key question will be, "How much did he actually know
about the specific harms that were cited in the documents
that the researchers found, and how much did sanction them?"