Thread by @oliviasolon

Having spent a long time going through the leaked FB docs it’s clear pockets of FB are painfully aware of how its platform can harm people. It has also conducted countless experiments to try to mitigate those harms.

Its failure to do more seems partly strategic (business priorities) but a lot to do with the left hand not talking to the right hand and other structural inefficiencies in a sprawling bureaucracy

It certainly breaks things, but it doesn’t/can’t really move fast due to significant corporate bottlenecks

It makes sense that the researchers paid to understand and mitigate the harms would expect corporate overlords to act on their (often horrifying) findings but you can also see that there are often messy trade-offs.

Sometimes those trade-offs seem grubby, like intervention from FB’s policy team to stave off political scrutiny, but other times it’s about unintended consequences on speech or trying to prioritise long term solutions over fire-fighting ones

Here's our report capturing a lot of that messiness
nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news…

In short, there seems to be a lot more ineptitude than malice and the journey between "knowing about X" and "doing something about X" is a lot more convoluted than one might expect from a company that publicly prides itself on being agile.