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By Tara Subramaniam, CNN
Over the past few years, Facebook has come under repeated criticism for everything from how the company’s products psychologically harm their users to its role in spreading fake news, particularly in connection with the 2016 election. .
Earlier this month, a Wall Street Journal investigation put Facebook back in the spotlight by claiming that the tech giant’s senior executives had not addressed its issues despite internal research detailing the platform’s negative effects, ranging from spreading disinformation and inciting to anger at the deterioration of adolescent mental health.
Responding to the latest reports, Facebook vice president of global affairs Nick Clegg said in a declarationAt the heart of this series is a simply bogus claim: that Facebook conducts research, and then systematically and intentionally ignores it if the results are troublesome for the business.
While CNN cannot confirm Facebook’s motives or intentions, one thing is clear: On more than one occasion, Facebook officials have said one thing in public while internal documents told a different story.
Impact on the mental health of children and adolescents
In a Hearing at the March 2021 CongressRep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, Republican from Washington State, asked Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg if he agrees that “too much time in front of screens passively consuming content”, like social media, is harmful for children’s mental health.
In response, Zuckerberg noted, “I don’t think the research is conclusive on this.”
“The research we’ve seen is that using social apps to connect with other people can have positive mental health benefits,” Zuckerberg added. “Passive consumption of content doesn’t have these positive wellness benefits, but it’s not necessarily negative. “
Two months later Instagram chief Adam Mosseri said journalists that the research he had seen suggested that the negative impact of the app on teens was “quite small.”
However, research, including studies conducted by Facebook itself, contradicts these claims. Documents uploaded to an internal bulletin board, some more than a year before Zuckerberg’s testimony and obtained by the Wall Street Journal, indicate that Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, has had a negative impact on many of its millions of users, especially young women.
In a September 2021 episode of “The Journal” podcast, editor and co-host Kate Linebaugh reported that, “An internal document says that for teenage girls who had recently experienced body image issues, Instagram made those feelings worse for one in three of them.”
“Time and time again they (researchers) report that teens say that constant comparison on Instagram contributes to higher levels of anxiety and depression,” said Georgia Wells, a WSJ reporter. noted on the podcast.
Facebook Founding Chairman Sean Parker even admitted at an Axios event in 2017 that “God only knows” what social media is doing to children’s brains.
Parker noted He and Zuckerberg knew early on that the “social validation feedback loop” inherent in the design and algorithms of social platforms like Facebook “exploited a vulnerability in human psychology,” but they “did it anyway.”
Earlier this month, Mosseri acknowledged in a maintenance that some of the problems highlighted in the WSJ survey series “are not necessarily generalized, but their impact on people can be enormous. Instagram can hurt young users, “‘There is a lot of good that comes with what we do.'”
In a September 14 statement, Instagram Public Policy Officer Karina Newton noted that they “stick” to internal research, but argued that the Wall Street Journal article “focuses on a limited set of findings and presents them in a negative light.”
2016 election
Speaking at a conference shortly after the presidential election, Zuckerberg claims the idea that the fake news on Facebook influenced the election in any way was “pretty crazy”. When testifying before Congress in April 2018, Zuckerberg said the company became aware of new Russian “information operations” on the platform “around the time of the 2016 election itself.”
But according to an excerpt from “An ugly truth: in the battle for the domination of Facebook” A book by New York Times reporters Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang, the company’s security team first detected Russian activity on the platform in March, eight months before the election. The authors write that Facebook’s security chief at the time, Alex Stamos, “” felt he had been trying to sound the alarm on Russia for months “” and informed people of his “” reporting chain “”. The excerpt from the book says Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg were not made aware of the extent of Russian interference until Stamos informed them in December.
As Facebook investigated the extent of Russian influence, they continued to make public statements contradicting internal documents from that time.
In July 2017, a Facebook spokesperson told CNN “We saw no evidence that Russian actors bought ads from Facebook in connection with the elections,” but in September, Facebook said an internal review conducted between June 2015 and May 2017 had discovered some 3,000 ads “connected to approximately 470 non-genuine accounts and pages in violation of our policies.” The company noted the accounts and pages “probably operated from Russia,” and although the “vast majority” didn’t specifically refer to the election, some did. Overall, the ads “appeared to focus on amplifying divisive social and political messages across the ideological spectrum.”
Talk exclusively To CNN’s Laurie Segall in March 2018, shortly after Cambridge Analytica announced that it was collecting user data, Zuckerberg said, “I think what’s clear is that in 2016 we didn’t weren’t as aware of a number of issues as we should have [been] whether it is Russian interference or fake news.
Rotate to video
When Facebook’s public statements diverge widely from findings based on internal documents and research, it can have big ripple effects. The conflicting messages from Facebook have had consequences ranging from the impact of an election to the development of business models.
In April 2016, shortly before the company announcement new features for its Facebook Live videos, Zuckerberg told BuzzFeed News, “We are entering this new golden age of video.” Two months later, Nicola Mendelsohn, the top Facebook executive in Europe, Recount at a Fortune magazine conference in London that the platform’s content would likely be “all video” within five years.
In September of the same year, Facebook disclosed that he miscalculated, and in some cases overestimated, several metrics advertisers relied on, including the average time users spent watching videos. This error likely cost both advertisers and the companies who had answered the call to switch to video, including many media organizations who licensed writers.
Facebook claims they discovered the error about a month before they publicly announced it.
A class action initially filed in 2016 cited internal documents unveiled in 2018 as proof that Facebook engineers knew video watch time metrics were overestimated more than a year before publicly acknowledging it.
According to the amended complaint, Facebook told advertisers that they had “recently discovered a gap” while “staff have stressed internally that” we haven’t recently discovered a gap.
The trial, which originally claimed that Facebook’s inaccurate measurements represented unfair business conduct and later added the fraud allegation, was finally settled. According to the regulation proposed in October 2019, Facebook OK to pay $ 40 million and admit there was a metric miscalculation, but not to admit wrongdoing regarding the other allegations.
Facebook also faced separate legal action over allegations that it was aware of issues with another measure called potential reach before it was disclosed to advertisers.
A complaint filed in October 2018 alleged that Facebook knew about errors before they happened first made public, quoting internal emails in which Sandberg acknowledged that she had been aware of the issues with the potential reach metric for several years.
Those internal documents cited in lawsuit and unsealed in February 2021 suggests that Facebook may have known about the error at least a year before Facebook Live’s push and even before Zuckerberg’s comments on “the golden age of video “.
Facebook spokesperson Joe Osborne told CNN Business at the time, “These documents are handpicked to match the complainant’s story.”
Osborne called the potential reach “a useful campaign planning tool that advertisers are never billed on,” adding, “This is an estimate and we make it clear how it is calculated in our advertising interface and help center. “.
The-CNN-Wire
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