As Capitol riot was taking place, social-media giant Facebook was dealing with its own problems
As supporters of Donald Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, battling police and forcing lawmakers into hiding, an insurrection of a different kind was taking place inside the world’s largest social media company.
It’s a question that still hangs over the company today, as Congress and regulators investigate Facebook’s part in the Jan. 6 riots. What Facebook called “Break the Glass” emergency measures put in place on Jan. 6 were essentially a tool kit of options designed to stem the spread of dangerous or violent content that the social network had first used in the run-up to the bitter 2020 election. As many as 22 of those measures were rolled back at some point after the election, according to an internal spreadsheet analyzing the company’s response.
Facebook’s decisions to phase certain safety measures in or out took into account signals from the Facebook platform as well as information from law enforcement, said spokeswoman Dani Lever. “When those signals changed, so did the measures.”Some employees were unhappy with Facebook’s managing of problematic content even before the Jan. 6 riots.
Within a single day, page recommendations for this account generated by Facebook itself had evolved to a “quite troubling, polarizing state,” the study found. By day 2, the algorithm was recommending more extremist content, including a QAnon-linked group, which the fake user didn’t join because she wasn’t innately drawn to conspiracy theories.
“Hey! This is such a thorough and well-outlined study,” one user wrote, their name blacked out by the whistleblower. “Do you know of any concrete changes that came out of this?”
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