The social network hardly dedicates resources to combat false information outside the US and its effectiveness is almost nil in developing countries such as India.
New internal Facebook documents obtained by the US press and published this Monday indicate that the social network company hardly dedicates resources to combat false information outside the US and its effectiveness is almost nil in developing countries such as India .
According to a report prepared by the company itself, in 2020 84% of actions against false information on Facebook and Instagram (owned by it) occurred in the US, despite the fact that the vast majority of its users are outside of that country.
The situation is particularly serious in developing countries, especially those that do not have English as their first language, where many of the content filters that do exist in the United States are not applied.
India, the country in the world with the most Facebook users (the social network is banned in China by the government) is the best example of the lack of controls on the platform, despite having been rated on several occasions by company executives as a strategic market.
A study carried out by Facebook workers found that an Indian user who created a new account soon after was overwhelmed by “a shower of nationalist content prone to polarization, false information, violent content and blood.”
In recent days, a consortium of 17 US media have been publishing articles based on what they have dubbed “the Facebook papers”, thousands of internal documents delivered to the US Government and Congress by the former employee. from the Frances Haugen social network.
Most of the content of these documents was already known as they were the same ones that were leaked weeks ago by Haugen herself to The Wall Street Journal, which published them over several days in a series entitled “the Facebook archives.”
The consortium of 17 media, which includes CNN, The New York Times and The Washington Post, is helping to analyze these thousands of documents and provide more details or highlight elements that did not receive notoriety in the Journal reports.
Haugen, who testified before a US Senate subcommittee in early October, is today doing the same before the UK Parliament.
For its part, the company issued a statement in which it assures that “the premise of all these stories is false” because although Facebook is a business that tries to make profits, the idea that they do so at the cost of safety or well-being of people “is a misinterpretation.” (I)
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