Under the title "Internal Documents: Facebook Employees Alarmed About Misinformation on Elections," the Alhurra website reported that months after the American elections that led Democrat Joe Biden to the White House, internal documents from Facebook revealed that employees at the social media giant warned before the elections about the spread of misinformation on the platform.
A report from The New York Times, which obtained and published the content of the documents, stated that employees reported accounts promoting conspiracy theories. It was noted that sixteen months prior to the presidential elections in November, a Facebook researcher spoke of what he described as a "concerning development," discussing a test account that opened within a week and promoted a conspiracy theory advocated by the QAnon movement.
On November 5, two days after the elections, another Facebook employee sent a message alerting colleagues that comments containing "misinformation about the elections" were present on many posts. The report adds that four days later, the company’s data scientist wrote in a memo to coworkers that 10 percent of all views sourced from the U.S. claimed that voting was fraudulent.
According to the documents, Facebook employees raised alarms about misinformation and incendiary content on the platform and urged action, but the company failed to address the issue. Facebook publicly blamed the spread of lies about the elections on former President Donald Trump.
In mid-January, Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s Chief Operating Officer, stated that the riots that occurred at the Capitol on January 6 were "largely organized on platforms that do not have our capabilities to stop hate." In March, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, told lawmakers that the company "did its part to ensure the integrity of our elections."
However, the company’s documents show how aware Facebook was of the extremist movements and groups on the platform that were trying to sway American voters before the elections. The documents also provide new details regarding how much the company’s specialists knew after the elections about the flow of misinformation suggesting that votes had been manipulated against Trump.
The newspaper notes that the documents do not provide a complete picture of how decision-making is conducted within Facebook. According to the documents, Facebook employees believe the company could have done much to stop the spread of misinformation.
The three major social media networks, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, imposed a ban on the Republican billionaire following the violent attack by a group of his supporters on the Capitol on January 6 in an attempt to prevent Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s victory in the presidency. It is noteworthy that a former Facebook employee named Frances Haugen, a former data engineer at the company, accused the group of "choosing profit over the safety" of its users.
