Facebook’s diversity woes blamed for fake accounts
Social network has major blind spot, lawmaker says
SAN FRANCISCO – In a heated moment during last week’s Capitol Hill hearings, Rep. Terri Sewell questioned whether the paucity of African Americans in Facebook’s workforce — and more specifically on the teams of reviewers who vet content and advertising — contributed to the company’s failure to catch Russian operatives using fake accounts to stoke racial tensions ahead of last year’s presidential election.
Displayed behind Sewell, a Democrat from Alabama and a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, was one of the Russian- backed ads showing a famous black- and- white photograph of the Black Panthers from1968 with the caption: “Never forget that the Black Panthers, group formed to protect black people from the KKK, was dismantled by us govt but the KKK exists today.”
The Facebook ad was intended to exploit racial divisions and get AfricanAmerican users to follow a fake Russian account called Blacktivist. It was shared on Facebook at least 29,000 times.
“Who are your vetters, and are they a diverse group of people?” Sewell confronted Facebook’s general counsel Colin Stretch.
“Like every aspect of our workforce, we are committed to building a workforce that is as diverse as the community we serve,” Stretch replied.
“You’re saying I should trust that your vetters, who will be vetting this kind of information, are going to be a diverse workforce?” Sewell asked.
“What you should be confident of is thatwe understand the importance of diversity,” Stretch said.
From Washington to Silicon Valley, that confidence is sorely lacking. Despite repeated pledges to close the racial gap in its U. S. workforce, a tiny fraction — 3% — of Facebook is AfricanAmerican. In all, Facebook employs 259 black people, according to the company’s most recent government filing. That’s out of 11,241 people.
The Russian infiltration of Facebook is just the most recent example of how that lack of diversity creates major blind spots for the giant social network that’s staffed mostly by white and Asian men, says University of Southern California professor Safiya Umoja Noble, author of the upcoming book Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism.
The reality: With people screening content on Facebook spread around the globe, many of them working as lowly paid contractors, it’s possible that few, if any, are African American and therefore are far less familiar with and invested in racially coded messages about the Black Lives Matter movement and civil rights issues in the U. S., Noble says.
“We have to ask how it is that congressional members have enough knowledge to recognize the problematic nature of the kind of hateful and divisive advertising that is allowed to proliferate on these platforms, but that some of the best engineers in Silicon Valley, and their CEOs, can’t acknowledge the significance of it,” she said.
Sewell’s face- off with Facebook during Wednesday’s House Intelligence Committee hearing on Capitol Hill follows weeks of criticism from the Congressional Black Caucus over Facebook’s handling of fake Russian pages and ads.
The pages and the ads they placed, rigged to look like the work of American activists, spread incendiary messages during and after the presidential campaign. Facebook repeatedly denied the Russians exploited its platform until September. Last week, the company admitted that 146 million Americans may have been reached on Facebook and Instagram.
The black community had raised suspicions about those posing as activists on Facebook and Twitter.
When the Russian- backed “Blacktivist” Facebook page and Twitter account called for a march in Baltimore after the police custody death of Freddie Gray, Rev. Heber Brown III, pastor of a Baltimore church, confronted Blacktivist, asking if those behind the account organizing the police brutality march were local. The account responded that it was not based in Baltimore but was “looking for friendship, because we are fighting for the same reasons.”
Brown retorted that Black tivist should “come learn and listen before you lead.” When he later learned that the account was fake and based in Russia, Brown said he was stunned that he had disrupted a “Russian op.”
Another fake Facebook page operated by the Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg, Russia, Black Matters, promoted a protest in New York City the Saturday after the election with a Facebook ad. More than16,700 people signed up to attend on the event page and 33,000 said theywere interested in the event. Tens of thousands showed up.
That such an extensive covert effort by an adversarial foreign power mimicked U. S. political discourse and gained big followings by targeting specific groups of American Facebook users and spreading racially divisive messages is deeply worrying to Allison Jones, director of communications of Code2040, a San Francisco organization that works to increase the diversity of the tech industry’s workforce.
Jones says igniting racial animosity is a common technique used for centuries to exploit divisions to amass and maintain power. Now, with the enormous reach and influence of social media in today’s society, it’s more effective thanever, making it evenmore crucial that Facebook and other technology companies employ diverse workforces, she says.
Facebook employs 259 black people, according to the company’s most recent government filing. That’s out of 11,241 people.