Facebook concedes it took too long to see social media’s harmful effects
Facebook has been taking a hard look at how it’s affecting democracy, and the social media giant doesn’t like everything it sees in the mirror.
On Monday, the company admitted it took too long to recognize how its site was being abused to spread misinformation or sow division during the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
“In 2016, we at Facebook were far too slow to recognize how bad actors were abusing our platform. We’re working diligently to neutralize these risks now,” Samidh Chakrabarti, Facebook’s product manager of civic engagement, wrote in a blog post.
Company CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg initially dismissed the notion that Facebook influenced the election as a “pretty crazy idea.”
Since then, Facebook has been trying to understand the social network’s good and bad effects on democracy.
On one hand, social media has made it easy for people worldwide to voice their political opinions, get information quickly and speak directly to politicians. On the other, Facebook has also been abused to spread misinformation or divide the American public.
“Facebook was originally designed to connect friends and family — and it has excelled at that. But as unprecedented numbers of people channel their political energy through this medium, it’s being used in unforeseen ways with societal repercussions that were never anticipated,” Chakrabarti said.
Last year, Facebook found 80,000 posts from accounts linked to a Russian entity that reached around 126 million people in United States from 2015 to 2017.
But by that time, the U.S. presidential election was already over.
“This was a new kind of threat that we couldn’t easily predict, but we should have done better,” Chakrabarti said.