Facebook’s staff dissects its election role
Employees sounded alarm about falsehoods spread on the website
Sixteen months before last November’s presidential election, a researcher at Facebook described an alarming development. She was getting content about the conspiracy theory QAnon within a week of opening an experimental account, she wrote in an internal report.
On Nov. 5, two days after the election, another Facebook employee posted a message alerting colleagues that comments with “combustible election misinformation” were visible below many posts.
Four days after that, a company data scientist wrote in a note to his co-workers that 10 percent of all U.S. views of political material — a startlingly high figure — were of posts that alleged the vote was fraudulent.
In each case, Facebook’s employees sounded an alarm about misinformation and inflammatory content on the platform and urged action — but the company failed or struggled to address the issues.
The internal dispatches were among a set of Facebook documents obtained by the New York Times that give new insight into what happened inside the social network before and after the November election, when the company was caught flat-footed as users weaponized its platform to spread lies about the vote.
Facebook publicly has blamed the proliferation of election falsehoods on former President Donald Trump and other social platforms.
In mid-January, Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, said the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol was “largely organized on platforms that don’t have our abilities to stop hate.” Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, told lawmakers in March that the company “did our part to secure the integrity of our election.”
But the company documents show the degree to which Facebook knew of extremist movements and groups on its site that were trying to polarize American voters before the election. The documents also give new detail on how aware company researchers were after the election of the flow of misinformation that claimed votes had been manipulated against Trump.
What the documents don’t offer is a complete picture of decisionmaking inside Facebook. Some internal studies suggested that the company struggled to exert control over the scale of its network and how quickly information spread, while other reports hinted that Facebook was concerned about losing engagement or damaging its reputation.
Yet what was unmistakable was that Facebook’s own employees believed the social network could have done more, according to the documents.
“Enforcement was piecemeal,” read one internal review in March of Facebook’s response to Stop the Steal groups, which contended that the election was rigged against Trump. The report’s authors said they hoped the post-mortem could be a guide for how Facebook could “do this better next time.”
Many of the dozens of Facebook documents reviewed by the Times haven’t been previously reported.
Some of the internal reports initially were obtained by Frances Haugen, a former Facebook product manager turned whistleblower.
Andy Stone, a Facebook spokesperson, said the company was “proud” of the work it did to protect the 2020 election. He said Facebook worked with law enforcement, rolled out safety measures, and closely monitored what was on its platform.
“The measures we did need remained in place well into February, and some, like not recommending new, civic or political groups, remain in place to this day,” he said. “The responsibility for the violence that occurred on Jan. 6 lies with those who attacked our Capitol and those who encouraged them.”
For years, Facebook employees warned of the social network’s potential to radicalize users, according to the documents.
In July 2019, a company researcher studying polarization made a startling discovery: A test account she had made for a “conservative mom” in North Carolina received conspiracy theory content recommendations within a week of joining the social network.
The internal research, titled “Carol’s Journey to QAnon,” detailed how the Facebook account for an imaginary woman named Carol Smith had followed pages for Fox News and Sinclair Broadcasting. Within days, Facebook had recommended pages and groups related to QAnon, the conspiracy theory that falsely claimed Trump was facing down a shadowy cabal of Democratic pedophiles.
By the end of three weeks, Carol Smith’s Facebook account feed had devolved further. It “became a constant flow of misleading, polarizing and low-quality content,” the researcher wrote.
“We’ve known for over a year now that our recommendation systems can very quickly lead users down the path to conspiracy theories and groups,” the researcher wrote. “In the meantime, the fringe group/set of beliefs has grown to national prominence with QAnon congressional candidates and QAnon hashtags and groups trending in the mainstream.”