Facebook could create much-needed goodwill by publishing reports into its high-profile missteps, like failing to remove posts inciting violence in Kenosha, WI
The Verge : Tweets: @caseynewton Tweets: Casey Newton / @caseynewton : Talked to a former Facebook moderator and some other folks about the Kenosha situation and why that page didn't come down until long after it had been reported https://www.getrevue.co/... https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Casey Newton's piece lands in a stretch where Facebook's internal record kept contradicting its public statements: two days later, reporting showed the company told employees it had deleted the Kenosha Guard event page when internal documents showed the admin removed it himself. Earlier in 2020, sources described Zuckerberg shelving research into Facebook's polarizing effect, and the News Feed team bristling when CrowdTangle data surfaced the platform's most-engaged stories.
First-order effects
- Facebook's credibility with employees and press is the immediate casualty — the company's own account of the Kenosha deletion proved wrong within days, compounding the original failure to remove reported incitement.
Second-order effects
- The pattern gives journalists and researchers a ready-made template: every future moderation failure gets checked against leaked internals, as happened when BuzzFeed later found third-party mods were never told to enforce the 2019 call-to-arms policy.
Third-order effects
- If internal findings keep surfacing through leaks rather than publication, pressure builds for externally verifiable moderation audits — the New Yorker's verdict that Facebook lacks the will to fix itself frames self-published postmortems as the alternative regulators may impose instead.
The trend: Platform governance is drifting toward forced transparency, with each leak of suppressed internal research making voluntary disclosure cheaper than the next revelation.