A little less than four years have passed since the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which for the first time really questioned the holding of Facebook and even the position of Mark Zuckerberg. Today many analysts consider that period for the Californian company to be very black. And this is also confirmed by the historical trend of the stock on the stock market. But dirty rain is back on Facebook’s head. And the company is going through a new big scandal, which is exposing all the frailties of the Zuckerberg giant.
Everything originates from some documents provided to the American Congress by former employee Frances Haugen. Documents that ended up in the hands of some newspapers. Thousands of pages that reveal more or less hidden information about the Menlo Park company. And who try to nail Zuckerberg on some key points: the “blue” social network does not do enough to guarantee the safety of its 2.9 billion users, it minimizes the damage it can cause to society and has repeatedly deceived investors and users. For now, at least 4 cumbersome revelations have emerged from these pages. Let’s see them.
Moderation
Facebook is often accused of failing to moderate hate speech on its English-language sites, but the problem appears to be even worse in countries where other languages are spoken. And this – according to documents delivered to Congress – even after promising to invest more after being accused of “facilitating” the genocide in Myanmar in 2017. A 2021 document warned about the very low number of human content moderators in the Arabic dialects spoken in Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Libya. Another study in Afghanistan, where Facebook has 5 million users, found that pages explaining how to report hate speech were also translated incorrectly. The failures occurred even as Facebook research flagged some countries as “high risk” due to their volatile political landscape and the frequency of hate speech that appeared online.
According to an internal report, the company has allocated 87% of its budget for the development of proprietary algorithms capable of detecting fake news in the United States in 2020, compared to 13% invested in the rest of the world. And for this Frances Haugen wrote that Facebook should be transparent about the resources invested in the various countries and in the various languages.
Facebook doesn’t know its algorithms
Several internal documents, which ended up in the hands of the American Congress, show that Facebook itself has many doubts about its algorithms. A September 2019 note found that men received 64% more political posts than women in “almost all countries,” with a particularly large problem in African and Asian countries. While men were more likely to follow accounts that produce political content, the document highlighted that Facebook’s feed ranking algorithms had also played a significant role.