![]() 6, Facebook considered re-enabling some of its old strategies and implementing new ones, according to the documents, to respond to the risk of "violence and incitement" in connection with the day's events. Measures that were disabled, the official said, were done so gradually.ĭuring the chaos of Jan. When asked about the rollback of the measures, a Facebook official stressed that they were only part of Facebook's preparations for the election, and that specific metrics were used to determine whether or not to disable them. "This action was entirely irresponsible and illustrative of wider failings in Facebook in wrongly prioritizing platform growth over safety," he said. 6 that was inflamed by a "dangerous mix of disinformation and conspiracy theories." Several of the restrictions listed as having been previously rolled back focused on groups, such as freezing commenting on some group posts or preventing groups from changing their names to include terms that aimed to delegitimize the election result.Ĭiaran O'Connor, a disinformation analyst with the London-based think tank Institute for Strategic Dialogue, said keeping these type of measures in place may have prevented extremism on Jan. The documents indicate that more severe restrictions, known internally as "break glass" measures, had been active earlier, in 2020, and then removed or rolled back. 6 show a wider range of restrictions explored by Facebook to limit potentially harmful content and mitigate violence and incitement. There were around seven times as many hourly reports about posts containing incitement to violence as in the previous week, according to the document.Īnother set of documents created during the events of Jan. The document shows there was a spike in the volume of reports from Facebook and Instagram users complaining about posts inciting violence on Jan. 7, shows that Facebook analyzed some of the Capitol riot's impact on its platforms. The memo comes two weeks after Facebook issued a statement on its corporate website hitting back against a series of critical articles in the Wall Street Journal.One of the documents, updated on Jan. But what evidence there is simply does not support the idea that Facebook, or social media more generally, is the primary cause of polarization,” Clegg wrote. In truth, there isn’t a great deal of consensus. “The rise of polarization has been the subject of swathes of serious academic research in recent years. He said that many things had contributed to America’s divisive politics. As a result, the prevalence of hate speech on our platform is now down to about 0.05%.” The violence and chaos of the attack sent shockwaves throughout the US, and the rest of the world, and saw scores of people injured and five die.Ĭlegg, a former former UK deputy prime minister, said in his memo that Facebook had “developed industry-leading tools to remove hateful content and reduce the distribution of problematic content. The 6 January insurrection was carried out by a pro-Trump mob that sought to disrupt the election of Joe Biden as president. The memo was first reported by the New York Times. In an internal 1,500-word memo titled Our position on Polarization and Election sent out on Friday, Facebook’s vice-president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, acknowledged that the whistleblower would accuse the company of contributing to the 6 January Capitol riot and called the claims “misleading”.
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