Facebook Papers: Revelations of internal documents from Mark Zuckerberg’s social network

This Monday the revelations called ‘Facebook Papers’ were known worldwide, after journalists from various newsrooms worked together to gain access to thousands of pages of internal company documents obtained by Frances Haugen.

Whistleblower Haugen, who is known as ‘the Facebook whistleblower’, was an employee of the successful social network who worked as a product manager on Facebook’s civic integrity team.

The Facebook Papers project represents a collaboration between 17 American news organizations, including The Associated Press.

According to Haugen’s versions, Zuckerberg has a tight grip on Facebook Inc. He owns the majority of the voting shares of the company, controls its board of directors and has increasingly surrounded himself with executives who do not seem to question his vision. .

The launch of The Facebook Papers project follows similar reports from The Wall Street Journal, obtained from the same documents, as well as Haugen’s appearance on the CBS television show “60 Minutes” and his October 5 testimony on the Capitol, in Washington, before a subcommittee of the US Senate.

The documents themselves are redacted versions of disclosures Haugen has made over several months to the Securities and Exchange Commission, alleging that Facebook was prioritizing profits over security and hiding its own investigation from investors and the public. These complaints cover a variety of topics, from their efforts to continue to grow their audience, how their platforms can harm children, to their alleged role in inciting political violence.

Media such as The New York Times or The Washington Post have compiled thousands of pages of internal Facebook documents that were provided to the United States Congress by former employee Haugen. These leaked documents show the social network as a company in internal conflict where data on the damage it causes are abundant, but solutions, much less the will to act accordingly, stagnate at best.

The crisis exposed by the documents shows how Facebook, despite its regularly declared good intentions, appears to have slowed down or neglected efforts to address the real damage that the social network has magnified and sometimes created. They reveal numerous cases in which researchers and grassroots workers uncovered deep-seated problems that the company later overlooked or ignored.

The ultimate responsibility for this state of affairs rests with CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who has what former employee Frances Haugen described as dictatorial power over a corporation that collects data on approximately 3 billion people around the world.

The same redacted versions of those documents are being provided to members of Congress as part of their investigation, the US media that are part of the consortium that has begun to reveal the Facebook Papers have reported. (I)