Facebook’s role in the Jan. 6 attack
Post Reports
The Washington Post
4.4 • 5.1K Ratings
🗓️ 25 October 2021
⏱️ ? minutes
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Summary
A trove of internal documents turned over to the SEC exposes Facebook’s role in fomenting the storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.
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Relief flowed through Facebook in the days after the 2020 presidential election. The company had cracked down on misinformation, foreign interference and hate speech — and employees believed they had largely succeeded in limiting problems that, four years earlier, had brought on perhaps the most serious crisis in Facebook’s scandal-plagued history.
“It was like we could take a victory lap,” said a former employee. “There was a lot of the feeling of high-fiving in the office.”
Many who had worked on the election, exhausted from months of unrelenting toil, took leaves of absence or moved on to other jobs. Facebook rolled back many of the dozens of election-season measures that it had used to suppress hateful, deceptive content. A ban the company had imposed on the original Stop the Steal group stopped short of addressing dozens of look-alikes that popped up in what an internal Facebook after-action report called “coordinated” and “meteoric” growth. Meanwhile, the company’s Civic Integrity team was largely disbanded by a management that had grown weary of the team’s criticisms of the company, according to former employees.
But the high-fives, it soon became clear, were premature.
Elizabeth Dwoskin reports on how this gap in the company’s protective measures paved the way for rioters to organize the Jan. 6 insurrection using their platform.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | These documents they're like an excavation to the dark heart of Facebook. |
| 0:09.5 | That's Elizabeth Duaskin, she covers Silicon Valley. |
| 0:12.3 | She's talking about a trove of documents recently obtained by the post. |
| 0:16.4 | Some of these documents were about how Facebook handled far-right groups in the days leading |
| 0:20.4 | up to January 6th. |
| 0:22.2 | And they support what many reporters and researchers have thought about Facebook for a long time. |
| 0:26.8 | But they've never fully had the evidence because the company is a black box and only they |
| 0:31.0 | know what happens inside their platform. |
| 0:33.7 | Today, we find out what's really been going on inside of Facebook. |
| 0:38.6 | From the newsroom of the Washington Post, this is Post Reports. |
| 0:42.0 | I'm Martine Powers. It's Monday, October 25th. |
| 0:50.7 | These are tens of thousands of documents that were spirited away by a whistleblower named |
| 0:56.2 | Francis Hogan. They really do contradict many of the company's public statements about |
| 1:03.8 | whether it's platform, by which I mean also what's up in Instagram are safe for the world. |
| 1:09.0 | So specifically, the company has been taken to task for having polarizing content. |
| 1:15.0 | And they'll say publicly, Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO, has himself said publicly, |
| 1:19.6 | the jury's out on whether social media polarizes people. |
| 1:22.8 | But inside, it has reams of its own research showing polarization. |
| 1:28.6 | They show that there are significant portions of people in the platform who are in |
| 1:33.0 | rabbit holes of misinformation. The documents also have a lot of damning information about |
| 1:37.5 | the failures around January 6th and the role of Facebook in the insurrection. |
| 1:42.4 | I would love to hear more about that about January 6th. |
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