7 Slides in the Facebook Papers About Jan. 6 and the News Feed

The only accessible to members of Congress and the media were once-confidential Facebook documents. More than 1,000 pages of the Facebook Papers have been published as of May 2. The first two releases cover the 2020 election, the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, and the processes behind Facebook's ranking algorithm. We put together a table of contents for all the documents that we will update as we publish more.

A poll was put out by Facebook ten days after the Capitol attack. A majority of Americans held the company partially responsible for the attack. Around 30% of users believed that Facebook was responsible, while 14% thought it was a great deal.

In the aftermath of the attack, Facebook's chief technology officer called on his staff to hang in there. The employees blamed the events of January 6 on Facebook and the misinformation surrounding the election. The comments by the two men are seen as hollow platitudes.

An internal report shows that the abuse reports around the Jan. 6 attack were seven times the normal rate. The overthrow of the government was called for by many of the flagged posts.

There were no protections against violent content in places like the app's list of most widely used hashtags, which left the violating content up and users potentially exposed. There were no protections against violence and I across several of the app's key features according to an employee.

In the second drop of the Facebook Papers, a note authored by an unknown employee explains the benefits and drawbacks of News Feeds. The note acknowledges that ranked feeds increase screen time, while reducing the quality of a users friends list.

An employee talks about what it means to be Silenced and have a voice on the platform.

Increasing transparency around how content is demoted in people's feeds won't necessarily help users understand how legitimate it is. They wrote at the top of the note that people fail to understand the idea of demotions out of context and that adding the concept itself is too complex.

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