The UN Human Rights Council said that Facebook has been a useful tool for those seeking to spread hate.
A former Facebook product manager leaked thousands of confidential memos, chat logs, and a library of hidden research to financial regulators. The leak was designed to convince the feds that the design flaws and misdeeds of Facebook far exceed what its executives have ever disclosed to their investors.
The documents were given to members of the Senate Commerce subcommittee chaired by Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat of Connecticut, who last month called the photo-sharing site a breeding ground for eating disorders and self harm. Gizmodo and some 300 other mostly Western journalists got their access from here.
There is a strong public need to make as many documents public as possible. We have formed a partnership with a small group of independent monitors, who are joining us to establish guidelines for an accountable review of the documents prior to publication. The mission is to minimize any costs to individuals privacy or the furtherance of other harms while ensuring the responsible disclosure of the greatest amount of information in the public interest.
The committee has some members.
Daniel Kahn Gillmor is a senior staff technologist at the American Civil Liberties Union. Daniel works at the intersection of technology and civil rights and civil liberties, in particular questions around how our tools and infrastructure shape access to our rights of privacy, speech, assembly, and justice.
Pri Bengani is a senior research fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism. Pri focuses on using computational techniques to research the digital media landscape, including investigating closed platforms, partisan and politically-funded local news networks, and the intersection of platform companies with the media.
The Associate Professor in Computer Science is Michael Zimmer. Michael is a privacy and data ethics scholar who focuses on privacy and data ethics, ethics of big data, internet research ethics, and the broader social and ethical dimensions of emerging digital technologies. Michael is the creator of The Zuckerberg Files, a digital archive of all public utterances of Facebook's founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg.
New York University Tandon School of Engineering has an Associate Professor named Damon McCoy. At the University of Colorado, Boulder, he received his PhD degree. His research focuses on measuring the security and privacy of technology systems.
Laura is a PhD candidate in computer science. Laura studies the spread of misinformation and hate in online political communication. She is a Belfer Fellow with the Anti-Defamation League.
The Associate Professor of Public Policy, Information and Communication is at the University of Massachusetts. The internet as a tool for civic engagement is the focus of the UMass Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure. He co-created Media Cloud, an open source tool for quantitative media analysis, as well as Global Voices, an international civic media community.
Our first decision was to require local experts to review any document focused on another country. One of the committee's main responsibilities is to vet local experts to work with reviewers.
The internet was not as big when Facebook came along. The social network held little sway over events in the real world back then. Facebook is one of the most influential companies on the planet and the most pervasive information platform ever created, even though it was a dorm-room novelty. The face of politics and life on a global scale has been altered by a machine. At its best, Facebook is a tool that connects billions, narrowing the divide between different peoples and cultures in ways previously unimaginable. It has served as the most efficient delivery system for toxic propaganda, empowering bigots and extremists to commit egregious crimes against humanity, quite literally being wielded as an instrument of war.
Facebook is often portrayed as a bulwark against the very crimes it begrudgingly deals with, if not the victim, in the media. There are few stories about the violent collision between Facebook and its underlying technologies, which seem to derive greater profits when driving people apart, and into increasingly dark places.
More than for privacy reasons, the documents require additional review to ensure that we aren't just handing criminals and spies a road map for subverting what controls Facebook has in place to defend against propaganda that spreads lies, hate, and fear. That would hurt the world's benefit from this act of justice.
We want to release our first batches of documents as soon as possible. The first release will most likely consist of documents that are the least inspected. Check back for more updates at the top of the article.
