Barack Obama and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg
Facebook billionaire Mark Zuckerberg recently denied to Congress his platform had any role in the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, instead blaming President Trump, who urged his supporters to protest "peacefully," and those individuals who invaded the building.
But now, according to a Daily Mail report, the company admitted in an internal document it didn't do what it could have to halt the exchange of information about plans for that day.
The report noted a "leaked internal report" that was called "Stop the Steal and Patriot Party: The Growth and Mitigation of an Adversarial Harmful Movement."
The report explained Facebook confirmed hindsight has shown how "election delegitimizing movements … grew, spread conspiracy, and helped incite the Capitol insurrection" on its platform.
That appears to conflict with Zuckerberg's claim to Congress that his corporation was "inhospitable to those who might do harm," even though the company said there was no conflict.
The Mail report commented, "The damning confession came in a leaked internal report … created by an internal task force and obtained by Buzzfeed."
The report explained Facebook admitted it struggled to distinguish between viable threats to overthrow the election and free speech in the run-up to the actions on Jan. 1, in which one Trump supporter was shot and killed by an unidentified police officer and several other protesters died of natural cases.
The report said: "Hindsight is 20/20, at the time, it was very difficult to know whether what we were seeing was a coordinated effort to delegitimize the election, or whether it was free expression by users who were afraid and confused and deserved our empathy. But hindsight being 20/20 makes it all the more important to look back to learn what we can about the growth of the election delegitimizing movements that grew, spread conspiracy, and helped incite the Capitol insurrection."
The worst "confession" by the company is that its own attempts to shut down organizers of "Stop the Steal" blocked its attempts to stop the movement's "disinformation."
The report shows FB didn't know the "Stop the Steal" movement was building for months before Nov 3. On election day it exploded in a viral FB group that “normalized delegitimization and hate in a way that resulted in offline harm and harm to the norms underpinning democracy.”
— Craig Silverman (@CraigSilverman) April 22, 2021
The report said Facebook blocked the original group from its platform for "high levels of hate and violence," but by that point more than 300,000 were in the conversations and the ultimate result was dozens of other sites being created.
The Mail found; "The company admitted in the report that it was unprepared to deal with 'coordinated authentic harm' on its site, calling it a 'new territory' in which 'few policies or knowledge existed' prior to the events that day."
Facebook informed Buzzfeed on the topic that it "didn't catch everything," on the site but the report's findings aren't "definitive."
At the SFist blog, a commentary explained, "Zuckerberg’s human counterpart Sheryl Sandberg said in an interview with Reuters that the insurrection was 'largely organized on platforms that don’t have our abilities to stop hate, don’t have our standards and don’t have our transparency.'"
The blog charged, "Facebook public relations flacks have obviously been in a terrible spot lately, between this and the 530 million-user data breach that came to light earlier this month. But you gotta hand it to their tactic on this one, which is to undermine the credibility of their own internal report."
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