Inside Facebook’s Leaked Documents: What do they Reveal?

by E Jen Liu

Last month, former product manager Frances Haugen leaked the Facebook papers—containing an array of internal employee discussions, presentation slides, and memos—to the Securities and Exchange Commission and the media. The documents reveal internal research condemning Facebook’s impacts on mental health, failures to contain hate speech and misinforma tion, and the existence of a crosscheck system that privileges high-profile accounts. Haugen’s complaint exposed that the media conglomerate repeatedly prioritized profit over public safety, severely undermining its mission to bring the world closer together.

In our increasingly competitive attention economy, where time and mental focus are scarce commodities, Facebook is being crowded out by competitors like TikTok and Twitter. Generation Z consumers, who are more politically active than their predecessors, harbor valid concerns regarding privacy and demand greater corporate responsibility. Instead of recognizing its decline as a reckoning, Facebook continues to downplay its social impacts. The leaked files unveiled extensive internal research—previously withheld from

the public and lawmakers—demonstrating the negative mental health impacts of Facebook on its users. Slides from internal presentations concluded that Facebook makes body image issues worse for one in three teen girls, and many surveyed teens blamed Instagram for increased rates of anxiety and depression. Legislators will likely use these documentss to support their campaign against Facebook’s plan to launch Instagram Youth for users under 13.

Facebook lacks the human resources and technology to contain the spread of hate speech and misinformation on its platforms. In Ethiopia, an ethnic Amhara militia group used Facebook to fundraise and recruit new members—its efforts left unthwarted due to the platform’s inability to detect hate speech in Amharic and Oromo—leading to the ethnic cleansing of Tigrayans last year. In India, a dummy account created by Facebook employees to understand user experience—active during the recent surge in violence in Kashmir over territorial disputes between India and Pakistan—was flooded with anti-Muslim propoganda and photos of dead bodies. In the Philippines, Facebook products are used in labor trafficking—as described in an

internal report from February 2021—and solicitations written in Tagalog often go undetected. In Palestine, posts mentioning the Al-Aqsa Mosque were mistakenly removed by Facebook’s algorithm due to its name’s similarity to that of a militant group, leading to the censorship of critical content during the recent outbreak of violence in Gaza. The Facebook papers revealed that even though 90 percent of Facebook users are from outside of the United States, only 13 percent of the platform’s misinformation— and disinformation—work is devoted toward managing its foreign presence. The disproportion and insufficiency of resources devoted toward protecting users in vulnerable conflict-prone countries are shocking. Facebook’s crosscheck system was originally developed to help the company avoid public relations scandals but now exempts elites from many of its formal regulations. The system redirects the flagged posts of high-profile users to a separate team of Facebook employees rather than having them reviewed by the usual external moderators. The crosschecking process is meant to ensure that no mistakes are made when dealing with high-profile accounts but, in reality, means that the flagged posts are often not reviewed at all. As revealed in the leaked files, the crosscheck system allowed rule-breaking content to be viewed over 16 million times last year. This policy infringes Facebook’s promise to treat all users fairly and transparently. While Facebook is the gun and not the person behind it, the consequences of its irresponsibility and mismanagement are inexcusable. Facebook’s shares slid nearly five percent after the release of the documents, and the contents of the leak will likely be used in Washington’s antitrust war against the company. Failing to live up to its core values, Facebook is struggling to navigate difficult tradeoffs between security and liberty, neutrality and responsibility, profit and ethics.