Facebook documents show how the platform fueled rage ahead of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol washingtonpost.com/technology/202…
Relief flowed through Facebook in the days after the 2020 presidential election.
The company had cracked down on misinformation, foreign interference and hate speech. wapo.st/3b4YIi6
The company had cracked down on misinformation, foreign interference and hate speech. wapo.st/3b4YIi6
Employees believed they had largely succeeded in limiting problems that, four years earlier, had brought on perhaps the most serious crisis in Facebook’s scandal-plagued history.
But the high fives, it soon became clear, were premature. wapo.st/3b4YIi6
But the high fives, it soon became clear, were premature. wapo.st/3b4YIi6
A few weeks after Election Day the company began rolling back — as had always been planned — some unusually aggressive measures that had helped control toxic speech and misinformation on its platforms, although some others remained in place, officials say. wapo.st/3b4YIi6
On Jan. 6, Facebook staffers expressed their horror in internal messages as they watched thousands of Trump supporters shouting “stop the steal” and bearing the symbols of QAnon thronged the U.S. Capitol. wapo.st/3b4YIi6
Facebook has never publicly disclosed what it knows about how its platforms, including Instagram and WhatsApp, helped fuel that day’s mayhem. wapo.st/3b4YIi6
But thousands of pages of internal company documents disclosed to the Securities and Exchange Commission by the whistleblower Frances Haugen offer important new evidence of Facebook’s role in the events. wapo.st/3b4YIi6
This story is based on those documents, as well on others independently obtained by The Washington Post, and on interviews with current and former Facebook employees. The documents include outraged posts on Workplace, an internal message system. wapo.st/3b4YIi6
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