Facebook should release the documents behind WSJ's Facebook Files before others release them, which will let Facebook provide context that it says is missing
The company's least-bad option might also do a lot of good … The fallout from the Wall Street Journal'sFacebook Files series continues.
PlatformerCasey Newton
Context & Ripple Effects
The Facebook Files had already turned Facebook’s own research into a crisis portrayed as its most serious since Cambridge Analytica. The editorial argues that disclosure, rather than rebuttal alone, would let Facebook contest the interpretation of the underlying material.
The reporting cycle soon moved toward wider primary-source access: Facebook published two documents and the Journal released six documents underlying its reporting on Instagram and teen girls. That made control of the record, not just the public response, central to Facebook’s position.
First-order effects
Facebook’s communications response is pressed toward publishing source material with its explanations, rather than allowing the Journal’s selected documents to define the public record alone.
The Wall Street Journal gains a clearer basis to test Facebook’s claimed missing context against the documents themselves as more of the underlying research becomes public.
Second-order effects
Broader release of the documents gives other outlets, researchers, and critics material to independently assess Facebook’s internal findings, reducing the Journal’s exclusivity over the evidence.
Facebook’s publication of two documents alongside the Journal’s six-document release raises the cost of selective disclosure: each side’s framing can be compared directly with the available record.
Third-order effects
The episode points toward corporate crisis management in which internal research becomes a contested public artifact, with document access increasingly shaping credibility alongside formal statements.
As the leaked material later drew a multi-outlet reporting consortium, scrutiny of large platforms can become less dependent on a single newsroom and harder for a company to contain through one-to-one rebuttals.
The trend: Platform accountability fights are shifting from disputes over public messaging to competing control and interpretation of internal evidence.
@stevesi I agree these docs need context and the blog post FB did yesterday was helpful in that regard. I'm not arguing that all FB internal docs should be made public, but that the company does have a responsibility to share more about research in the public interest than it has…
@CaseyNewton @stevesi How was it helpful? They “cited” three studies and oscillated between using weighted/ modeled data and unmodeled, and weren't particularly clear on the source of each point
@ekp i'm cautiously optimistic? a lot of folks there want to share more. and they feel like the data mostly makes them look good. if it doesn't happen soon, it will happen when Europe passes the Digital Services Act and compels platforms to share data with researchers
@CaseyNewton I hope for the same. And of course there are ways to responsibly deal with participants' data and identities (which are already redacted before they're shared internally anyway). But as I said, I think there's little prospect of this happening in any meaningful way.
@CaseyNewton This will never happen. Maybe in some kind of deeply redacted way, but making all of FB's internal research public would not be prudent for the company on many levels (and as a former FB UXR, I have ethical qualms about my participants' data being shared publicly).
@cullend @stevesi it explained the broader context in which the research was done and highlighted aspects of the research that were more mixed or inconclusive
@CaseyNewton Do you think there's any chance it will happen? I can imagine them sharing some limited and perhaps additional data that is going to be shared anyway or helps them with their spin, but not anything else even if it is “the right thing to do” as you wrote
@CaseyNewton Even if a company releases all documents/emails/etc on a topic (any topic), doing so lacks the context of the organization, what people thought, and a time horizon of what would/could be done, when. Document dumps do serve to fan flames in search of smoking guns or s…
@swt2102 my hope is that (1) we can just look at the set of documents that the WSJ has, and that Congress will probably share eventually anyway; and (2) that some of the relevant data gets shared with qualified researchers for independent review. Not that it would all be public.
I think Facebook should release all of the Facebook Files to the public and share at least some of the underlying data with researchers. There's so much in there that is of the public interest. And it's the right thing to do. https://www.platformer.news/ ... https://twitter.com/.…