Employees of Facebook they had raised the alarm on multiple occasions about the spread of disinformation and conspiracy theories before and after the US presidential elections in November. But Mark Zuckerberg’s social media failed to address and manage the problem. Thousands of documents viewed by the US press prove it.
According to the Washington Post, Facebook has put growth and profits above the battle against hate speech, disinformation and other threats to the public. A former employee of Facebook he says so in an affidavit, referencing the statements of Tucker Bounds, the company’s communications officer. Regarding the controversy over Russian interference in the elections, he said in 2017: “It’s a flash in the pan. In a few weeks they will focus on other things while we print money.” Bounds, now vice president of communications, replied to the Washington Post that he was surprised to “be asked about an alleged face-to-face conversation four years ago with a person who has no face, and with no other source than an empty accusation.”
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by our correspondent Anna Lombardi
The New York Times cites internal documents a Facebook from which it emerges that the company was aware of the movements and groups of extremists who were trying to polarize American public opinion on its platform before the elections. While not offering a clear picture of the decision-making process Facebook, the documents reveal that the company’s employees were convinced that more needed to be done.
Sixteen months before the November 2020 presidential election, an employee of Facebook he had denounced the presence of an enormous mass of messages reviving conspiracy theories. On November 5, two days after the election, another employee of Mark Zuckerberg’s platform warned colleagues of the “misinformation that would inflame the election.” And one data analyst noted that ten percent of political-themed posts written by American accounts supported the hypothesis of election fraud.
US House accuses Bannon of outrage to Congress
by Massimo Basiile
These are just some of the stories cited by the US press, which has read internal messages from which it emerges that long before the presidential elections Facebook it knew that it harbored a huge amount of misleading and conspiratorial information, with no verified basis. But nobody did anything to block this flow of news. The social platform has publicly attributed the proliferation of false information to former President Donald Trump.
After the assault on Congress, which took place on January 6, the chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, had defended Facebook, arguing that there were no tools to stop hatred. But the documents that ended up in the hands of US newspapers show another story: many employees were aware of the flow of “fake news” and had raised an alarm.
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