Prior to the 60 Minutes interview, Nick Clegg posted an internal memo saying the whistleblower would accuse Facebook of relaxing election safeguards too soon
Yeah, about those annotations Facebook provided... https://www.nytimes.com/... Yael Eisenstat / @yaeleisenstat : A plea before the whistleblower speaks tonight: don't fall for Facebook's playbook of changing the conversation to be about her instead of about the documents she exposed. Any journalist/commentator who allows this to happen is doing a disservice. Speaking out is hard. Full stop. https://twitter.com/... Jason Kint / @jason_kint : Watch 60 Minutes at 7:30pm tonight immediately after the NFL game. Trust me. https://twitter.com/... https://twitter.com/... Nilay Patel / @reckless : Imagine criticizing Apple for the iPhone taking blurry photos and Apple replying that, on balance, people still use the iPhone to take photos of their families. That's Facebook right now. Dare Obasanjo / @carnage4life : Facebook employees freaking out that social media is bad for teens while it's just another Sunday at XBox Live, TikTok & Snapchat reminds me of Google employees staging walkouts over work considered mundane at Microsoft & Amazon. It's all about expectation setting or mis-setting Nilay Patel / @reckless : Until Facebook reckons with the fact that everyone judges them on content moderation because it's the only product it actually makes, they will forever be trapped trying to deflect attention from its own product to other people's work Antonio García Martínez / @antoniogm : FB reporters now in full Rambo mode. It even matches the jacket. https://twitter.com/... Trip Gabriel / @tripgabriel : “Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg have...remained behind the scenes to distance themselves from the negative press.” https://www.nytimes.com/... Trip Gabriel / @tripgabriel : “The whistle-blower was set to say that Facebook had turned off some of its safety measures too soon after Election Day, the memo said. That allowed for misinformation to flood the platform and for groups to congregate online and plan the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol building.” Farah Pandith / @farah_pandith : Hatebook needs to hire better spinners. How much do they pay their strategists? This is honestly just pathetic: he said that societal problems and political polarization have long predated the company and the advent of social networks in general. https://twitter.com/... Frank Figliuzzi / @frankfigliuzzi1 : Regulate social media now: Whistle-Blower to Accuse Facebook of Contributing to Jan. 6 Riot, Memo Says - The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/... Matthew Yglesias / @mattyglesias : It is a little odd that Facebook would bother to research whether or not their product is harmful given that the answer obviously isn't going to alter their decision-making. What was the point? https://twitter.com/... Kate Starbird / @katestarbird : Part of Nick Clegg's preemptive response to the FB whistleblower: “Indeed, polarizing content and misinformation are also present on platforms that have no algorithmic ranking whatsoever, including private messaging apps like iMessage and WhatsApp.” But... https://www.nytimes.com/... Brian Stelter / @brianstelter : I'll be asking @NickClegg about this on @ReliableSources in the AM... https://twitter.com/... Rat King / @mikeisaac : NEWS: Whistleblower will accuse Facebook of easing safeguards that led to the January 6th Insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, according to internal memo Policy VP Nick Clegg defends Facebook in a company-wide address from Friday evening, obtained by NYT https://www.nytimes.com/... Malcolm Nance / @malcolmnance : Facebook is a loaded gun pointed at the heart of democracy. Enough “likes” & they'll pull the trigger. https://twitter.com/... @60minutes : Sunday, meet the Facebook Whistleblower: a former employee who shared thousands of pages of internal research with the Securities and Exchange Commission. https://www.cbsnews.com/... Kim Masters / @kimmasters : Somehow this from @nickclegg leaked and now none of us are going to listen to the whistleblower? Slick, Nick. https://twitter.com/... Kara Swisher / @karaswisher : These verbal gymnastics illuminate nothing, which is why I would love to have @nickclegg on for a substantive full hour discussion on Sway at this important moment. Unfortunately, we get persistent declines from FB, even as they book on press with less experience in this arena. Kara Swisher / @karaswisher : Clever Clegg, but no one thinks FB is the PRIMARY cause, tho size creates an amplifier of unprecedented power: “What evidence there is simply does not support the idea that Facebook, or social media more generally, is the primary cause of polarization.” https://www.nytimes.com/... Sanho Tree / @sanhotree : “The whistle-blower, who plans to reveal her identity during the [60 Minutes] interview, was set to say that Facebook had turned off some of its safety measures around the election — such as limits on live video — too soon after Election Day, the memo said.” https://twitter.com/... Lil Brood X / @pleizar : A literal republican operative (Ben Kaplan) runs Facebook's DC office, no one should be surprised by this https://twitter.com/... Molly Jong-Fast / @mollyjongfast : Facebook, they're not just spreading disinformation about the vaccine they're also involved in the insurrection. https://www.nytimes.com/... Erik Reichenbach / @erikreichenb4ch : If you still have Facebook, what's your reason? I deleted what I could off Facebook some years ago & am really glad I did. There are other ways to do what Facebook offers without supporting a very broken & malicious company. Hoping @FCC can break off Instagram from FB too https://twitter.com/... Melissa Ross / @melissainjax : “The former employee says the documents prove the company knows its algorithms amplify polarizing and hateful content, adding that societies around the world are being torn apart.. Profit outweighs safety on Facebook, according to the former employee.” https://www.cbsnews.com/... Alex Kantrowitz / @kantrowitz : Nick Clegg memo to Facebook employee: How to talk to your family about the fact you work for us. https://www.nytimes.com/... https://twitter.com/... Andrew Hutchinson / @adhutchinson : I'm not sure Facebook's combative counter approach is the best way to go here, especially with these selective, and vague, defenses https://www.nytimes.com/... Blake Montgomery / @blakersdozen : “The whistle-blower was also set to say that Facebook then reaped record profits as its users flocked to the divisive content” https://www.nytimes.com/... @dzuidijk : #Facebook braces for new accusations from the whistleblower over the weekend. The company said in a memo that it was preparing to mount a vigorous defense https://www.nytimes.com/... via @MikeIsaac/@nytimes Prairy / @prairyfyre : Inside Facebook, executives have called a series of emergency meetings to try to extinguish some of the outrage. The firestorm is far from over. This Sunday night, the ex-employee who leaked internal company material will appear on 60 Minutes on CBS. https://www.nytimes.com/... Patience / @patiencezalanga : When Facebook received no real consequences for Cambridge Analytica, I think that should've signaled that they were and will continue to get away with worse. https://twitter.com/... Josh Raby / @joshraby : Something kinda darkly funny about the fact that the VP of Facebook is gonna try to defend the company against the whistleblower's claims on a CNN show called “Reliable Sources” https://twitter.com/... Lora Kolodny / @lorakolodny : no justice and no good change happens without whistleblowers https://twitter.com/... Rat King / @mikeisaac : read the memo in full, which we've embedded in the story below https://www.nytimes.com/... Rat King / @mikeisaac : Clegg posted the memo internally to employees on Friday evening, after the Times published a story about the past three weeks of emergency meetings and tumult at the company https://www.nytimes.com/... Caligirl / @caligirlinsf : @jason_kint She's reportedly going to reveal her identity on 60 Minutes on Sunday. https://www.npr.org/... Bobby Allyn / @bobbyallyn : “As a matter of optics, it could be disastrous for Facebook, but they seem not to care about that, and they are not very adept at avoiding disastrous optics.” https://www.npr.org/... Jason Kint / @jason_kint : I don't believe this premise is accurate. Reports have said she went to the SEC, too. That absolutely has to protect her but I'm not a lawyer let alone a whistleblower lawyer. https://twitter.com/...
Clegg’s role also fits Facebook’s longer-running reliance on him to publicly argue that its incentives do not favor more extreme content, as in his earlier defense of Facebook’s ranking incentives.
First-order effects
Facebook’s communications team must defend the timing of its election-safeguard rollback as the whistleblower’s claims reach a mass-audience CBS interview.
The whistleblower’s internal documents gain a clearer public test: whether Facebook’s stated safeguards matched its decisions after Election Day.
Second-order effects
Facebook’s later plan for more friends and less politics in News Feed will be judged against the allegations, increasing pressure for product changes to substantiate its public defense.
Clegg’s public-affairs operation becomes more directly accountable for connecting Facebook’s policy explanations to the company research disclosed by the former employee.
Third-order effects
If document-driven challenges continue to center on the gap between safety commitments and product decisions, platform governance will be measured less by broad assurances and more by the timing and durability of safeguards.
The trend: Major platforms are facing a shift from reputation management around content harms toward scrutiny of whether internal evidence aligns with specific safety-policy decisions.
Facebook has “blamed” their own researchers for negative press Jeff Horwitz, technology reporter, The Wall Street Journal, talks about the mood inside of Facebook after reporting that shows the company was aware of negative effects from their products. https://www.nbcnews.com/...…
Watching Nick Clegg talk to @brianstelter this morning makes it profoundly obvious Facebook still has not realized the only product it actually makes is content moderation. Everything else is a mechanism to convince *other people* to make content.
The end point of this stuff, as @evelyndouek and I have pointed out, is Jan 6 defendants arguing in court that Facebook is to blame for their actions https://www.nytimes.com/...
for the little it's worth, i think fb has a lot of work to do and needs to take more responsibility for its role, like all social media. but in the misinfo conversation more generally Online, we under-index on individual responsibility. or the role of many other institutions.
What do you do if you're Mark Zuckerberg and a Facebook whistleblower is about to go public detailing your company's role in spreading election lies ahead of Jan 6? You post video of your family sailing. https://twitter.com/...
It's odd reading this internal note from Facebook Vice President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg and seeing how it mimics past leaked talking points from the company. https://www.nytimes.com/...
This op-ed by @Klonick raises something I've been thinking about around news as well. Is user engagement (in its many flavors) always the right metric for us to chase when thinking about healthy audiences? https://www.nytimes.com/... https://twitter.com/...
“The whistle-blower was set to say that Facebook had turned off some of its safety measures too soon after Election Day, the memo said. That allowed for misinformation to flood the platform and for groups to congregate online and plan the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol building.”
(THREAD) Ahead of the #60Minutes interview with the Facebook whistleblower, know this: We contacted Facebook multiple times ahead of Jan. 6 to warn about violent rhetoric in a group with members that planned on taking matters into their own hands. https://www.snopes.com/...
This is a really important point! How are supposed to validate claims like this? Facebook surely can't expect anyone to just take their word for it at this point. https://twitter.com/...
I always think about how priscilla is a doctor and Facebook is a platform that is notorious for spreading anti vaccine disinformation https://twitter.com/...
Until Facebook reckons with the fact that everyone judges them on content moderation because it's the only product it actually makes, they will forever be trapped trying to deflect attention from its own product to other people's work
Two months ago: Facebook suspends researchers hours after learning they planned to start looking into Jan 6: https://gizmodo.com/... https://twitter.com/...
Imagine criticizing Apple for the iPhone taking blurry photos and Apple replying that, on balance, people still use the iPhone to take photos of their families. That's Facebook right now.
A plea before the whistleblower speaks tonight: don't fall for Facebook's playbook of changing the conversation to be about her instead of about the documents she exposed. Any journalist/commentator who allows this to happen is doing a disservice. Speaking out is hard. Full stop.…
Wait...you mean that 3 minutes from a 3 hour long hearing was used to misunderstand the very basic points that were being made about facebooks business model and then went viral when people posted it for likes and retweets? I'm shocked! Shocked I tell you! https://twitter.com/...
Hatebook needs to hire better spinners. How much do they pay their strategists? This is honestly just pathetic: he said that societal problems and political polarization have long predated the company and the advent of social networks in general. https://twitter.com/...
Clegg on Friday: “Facebook is the chief cause of polarization isn't supported by the facts.” March 2021: Facebook had an internal playbook to respond to allegations of polarization. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/ ...
6/ We still do not know why the company did not respond to our emails, nor is it clear why it waited nearly three months after the Capitol riot to take action on the group. It appears that Facebook realized its mistake and removed the group way later than it would have liked.
Clegg touts a useless stat - “the prevalence of hate speech on our platform is now down to about 0.05%” - yet Facebook refuses to validate its numbers, has zero transparency, bans good faith researchers like @LauraEdelson2, and is aggressively thwarting oversight.
Regulate social media now: Whistle-Blower to Accuse Facebook of Contributing to Jan. 6 Riot, Memo Says - The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/...
Facebook employees freaking out that social media is bad for teens while it's just another Sunday at XBox Live, TikTok & Snapchat reminds me of Google employees staging walkouts over work considered mundane at Microsoft & Amazon. It's all about expectation setting or mis-setting
Amazing personal story. Google paid for her mba then she got sick and had to quit, her caretaker got pulled into dark places online and that made her want to focus on the subject... https://www.wsj.com/...
“[In] the United States there is roughly one law enforcement officer for every 500 people. Facebook has 2.8 billion global monthly active users; that means just 1.3 people working in safety and security for every 100,000 users.” https://www.nytimes.com/...
It is a little odd that Facebook would bother to research whether or not their product is harmful given that the answer obviously isn't going to alter their decision-making. What was the point? https://twitter.com/...
NEWS: Whistleblower will accuse Facebook of easing safeguards that led to the January 6th Insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, according to internal memo Policy VP Nick Clegg defends Facebook in a company-wide address from Friday evening, obtained by NYT https://www.nytimes.com/...
Part of Nick Clegg's preemptive response to the FB whistleblower: “Indeed, polarizing content and misinformation are also present on platforms that have no algorithmic ranking whatsoever, including private messaging apps like iMessage and WhatsApp.” But... https://www.nytimes.com…
Sunday, meet the Facebook Whistleblower: a former employee who shared thousands of pages of internal research with the Securities and Exchange Commission. https://www.cbsnews.com/...
These verbal gymnastics illuminate nothing, which is why I would love to have @nickclegg on for a substantive full hour discussion on Sway at this important moment. Unfortunately, we get persistent declines from FB, even as they book on press with less experience in this arena.
Clever Clegg, but no one thinks FB is the PRIMARY cause, tho size creates an amplifier of unprecedented power: “What evidence there is simply does not support the idea that Facebook, or social media more generally, is the primary cause of polarization.” https://www.nytimes.com/..…
“The whistle-blower, who plans to reveal her identity during the [60 Minutes] interview, was set to say that Facebook had turned off some of its safety measures around the election — such as limits on live video — too soon after Election Day, the memo said.” https://twitter.com/.…
If you still have Facebook, what's your reason? I deleted what I could off Facebook some years ago & am really glad I did. There are other ways to do what Facebook offers without supporting a very broken & malicious company. Hoping @FCC can break off Instagram from FB too https:/…
“The former employee says the documents prove the company knows its algorithms amplify polarizing and hateful content, adding that societies around the world are being torn apart.. Profit outweighs safety on Facebook, according to the former employee.” https://www.cbsnews.com/...
I'm not sure Facebook's combative counter approach is the best way to go here, especially with these selective, and vague, defenses https://www.nytimes.com/...
“The whistle-blower was also set to say that Facebook then reaped record profits as its users flocked to the divisive content” https://www.nytimes.com/...
#Facebook braces for new accusations from the whistleblower over the weekend. The company said in a memo that it was preparing to mount a vigorous defense https://www.nytimes.com/... via @MikeIsaac/@nytimes
Inside Facebook, executives have called a series of emergency meetings to try to extinguish some of the outrage. The firestorm is far from over. This Sunday night, the ex-employee who leaked internal company material will appear on 60 Minutes on CBS. https://www.nytimes.com/...
When Facebook received no real consequences for Cambridge Analytica, I think that should've signaled that they were and will continue to get away with worse. https://twitter.com/...
Something kinda darkly funny about the fact that the VP of Facebook is gonna try to defend the company against the whistleblower's claims on a CNN show called “Reliable Sources” https://twitter.com/...
Clegg posted the memo internally to employees on Friday evening, after the Times published a story about the past three weeks of emergency meetings and tumult at the company https://www.nytimes.com/...
“As a matter of optics, it could be disastrous for Facebook, but they seem not to care about that, and they are not very adept at avoiding disastrous optics.” https://www.npr.org/...
I don't believe this premise is accurate. Reports have said she went to the SEC, too. That absolutely has to protect her but I'm not a lawyer let alone a whistleblower lawyer. https://twitter.com/...
The revelations of the @WSJ's Facebook Files series confirm what researchers and journalists have long suspected. There's an opportunity here for the company to change, if it seizes it, @Klonick writes: https://www.nytimes.com/...
We, as users of Facebook, have the power to change how @Facebook operates. Join UltraViolet, @kairos_action, @accountabletech, @dailykos, and more in our Facebook & Instagram logout campaign on November 10th >> https://thefblogout.com/ https://twitter.com/... https://twitter.com/…
This is unfortunate — execs who have traditionally defended research don't seem to be showing up. There are other ways the company could have responded to the reporting. This way seems to confirm that comms comes before work. https://www.nytimes.com/...
Facebook employees should be embarrassed. “In one group text message chain shared with The New York Times, Facebook data scientists and researchers discussed how they were being ‘embarrassed’ by their own employer.” https://www.nytimes.com/...
Since Instagram has roughly 1 billion users, and Facebook knows - from its *own* research - that 3% of them are suffering mental health problems because of the app, that's around 30 million people. https://www.nytimes.com/...
In the transformation of tv, people often forget just how many people still tune in to 60 Minutes on NFL Sundays especially when they bridge to a topic of interest across generations. Instagram + whistleblower + scandal is gold for ratings, very bad for Facebook. @brianstelter ht…
We all know that Facebook treated protecting kids with disregard. If it had protected kids, like it did its revenue growth, it would have done a whole lot more. Instead, Facebook has evaded, misled, & deceived. 7/
Facebook has asked us to trust it, but after these evasions & revelations, why should we? It's clear that Facebook has done nothing to earn that trust. Not from us, not from parents, not from the public. 4/
We now know while Facebook publicly denies that Instagram is deeply harmful for teens, privately Facebook researchers/experts have been ringing the alarm. 2/
Thread: If trending can get more people interested in discussing Facebook's heinous wrongs, let's talk about it. This month a whistleblower approached my office to provide reports & documents about Facebook & Instagram. What they reveal is damning. 1/
FB's top two execs have said nothing publicly about the crisis. Zuckerberg's only public comment about any reporting has been about his hydrofoil, while he's posted about new gadgets. Sandberg held a small business panel. How long can they remain quiet? https://www.nytimes.com/..…