Former Trump Campaign Manager and Chief Strategist Steve Bannon met with scores of Trump loyalists and political appointees this week at a private gathering at a DC social club. Hundreds of former Trump appointees and MAGA loyalists gathered to hear Steve’s plans for the next MAGA administration.
This has the radical left and DC elites, including Republican DC elites, in a panic.
Former Trump Campaign Manager and Chief Strategist Steve Bannon met with scores of Trump loyalists and political appointees this week at a private gathering at a DC social club. Hundreds of former Trump appointees and MAGA loyalists gathered to hear Steve’s plans for the next MAGA administration. This has the radical left and DC elites, … Continue reading Democrats and DC Insiders in Panic as Steve Bannon Fires Up Shock Troops at Private DC Gathering
We control this country, we’ve gotta start acting like it…We’re not gonna have 4,000 ready to go, we’re gonna have 20,000 ready to go, and we’re gonna pick the 4,000 best and most ready in every single department, and that’s how we really start to deconstruct the administrative state.
This terrifies the Uniparty and DC elites — that everyday Americans have had enough and are already making plans for the transition to sanity.
Zachary Petrizzo (@ZTPetrizzo) Tweeted: Steve Bannon said this morning he will have 20K “shock troops” on standby. “We control this country,” he added. “We have to start acting like it.” https://t.co/R47m5nVC78
WOW: Fauci Falsely Claims That Illegal Immigrants Aren’t Contributing To Covid Spread
On Sunday, far-left “Doctor” Anthony Fauci falsely claimed that illegal immigrants were not causing Covid outbreaks in the United States even though high numbers of illegals are testing positive for Covid.
“The problem is within our own country,” Fauci told fake news Jake Tapper. “Certainly immigrants can get infected but they’re not the driving force of this,” he added.
Fauci continued to dodge the next question, which revolved around an Government order that would allow immigration officials to expel migrants more quickly because of the pandemic.
Fauci claimed he “wasn’t familiar with the intricacies of that rule.” He added that “focusing on immigrants, expelling them, is not the solution to an outbreak.”
Just so you heard that correctly, Dr. Fauci thinks it’s 100% okay to keep Covid-positive migrants in in the United States.
Here’s more from theDaily Calleron the rate of Covid-positive migrants coming across the southern border:
“In March, more than 170,000 migrants crossed the border -many coming from countries with high infection rates – but according to The New York Times, Border Patrol wasn’t conducting tests for coronavirus except in cases where migrants showed obvious symptoms.
The Texas border city of McAllen stated that more than 7,000 COVID-positive migrants had been released into their community.”
What is your reaction to Fauci’s latest false claim? Comment below…
News wire pushed stories on collusion, Russian bounties, other disproven rumors.
Twitter, at the beginning of August announced the rollout of a new fact-checking initiative that will rely in part on a major news organization that regularly published reports on the now-debunked Trump-Russia collusion theory and other disproven attacks on the Trump administration.
The social media companysaid in an announcement on Monday that it had enlisted both The Associated Press and Reuters “to expand our efforts to identify and elevate credible information on Twitter.”
“Through this program, Twitter’s Curation team will increase our capacity to add reliable context to conversations happening on Twitter,” the company said.
Twitter added that the companies would work at “ensuring that credible information is available in real time around key conversations as they emerge on Twitter, especially where facts are in dispute or when Twitter’s Curation team doesn’t have the specific expertise or access to a high enough volume of reputable reporting on Twitter.”
Yet despite the venerable wire service’s vestigial reputation as an unbiased news source, today’s much-changed, more overtly aligned Associated Press has itself trafficked heavily in questionable reporting over the past several years regarding Donald Trump’s purported ties to and collusion with Russia, and various other debunked or dubious stories regarding the controversial former president.
The Russia collusion story was short on substantive evidence more or less from its beginning. Former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosensteinadmitted last year that by August 2017, there was effectively no proof of the conspiracy theory, even though the investigation would continue for roughly another two years.
Yet, The Associated Press, among others, regularly ran with reports on the alleged Trump-Russia scandal that lent weight and credibility to the conspiracy theory even if much of it rested on opaque sourcing and leaps of logic. Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller ultimately concluded there was no evidence if Trump-Russia collusion.
In one instance, AP allegedly went beyond reporting and injected itself into the federal investigation of former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, according to documents released under a Freedom of Information Act request. In an April 2017 meeting with Andrew Weissmann, then chief of the Justice Department’s Criminal Fraud Section, four AP reporters furnished the FBI with information about Manafort, including the code for Manafort’s locker at a storage facility in Virginia, the documents stated. Soon thereafter, Weissman assumed a key role in Robert Mueller’s Russia collusion investigation and took the lead in the prosecution of Manafort.
AP also was forced to issue several corrections on its Russia reporting, like thiscorrection from July 2018: “WASHINGTON (AP) — In some versions of a story July 5 about Russian billionaire Viktor Vekselberg, The Associated Press reported erroneously that Vekselberg had hired Michael Cohen as a consultant. It was the New York investment firm headed by his cousin, Andrew Intrater, that hired Cohen.”
Another time, in January 2019,AP admitted it got the number of Russians charged in the Mueller probe wrong. “WASHINGTON (AP) — In a story Jan. 17 about comments made by President Donald Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, The Associated Press reported erroneously the number of Russians charged with interfering in the 2016 presidential election. It is 25, not 32.”
The layers of anonymous sourcing and hearsay have been hallmarks of the Trump era in U.S. journalism. Last year, for instance, the APreportedon allegations the White House had been informed in 2019 of Russia offering bounties to Taliban-linked militia for the killing of U.S. troops in Afghanistan. The AP report cited “officials” who “insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to disclose the highly sensitive information.” A year later, itwas revealedthat the intelligence community “[did] not have conclusive evidence” to confirm the reality of those bounties.
In many cases, the news wire worked to finesse an unfavorable conclusion out of news that seemed markedly favorable to Trump:It argued in May 2019, for instance, that Trump had not been exonerated to any degree by the Mueller report’s inability to find evidence of a criminal conspiracy, underscoring Mueller’s peculiar legal argument that unknown information, had it been discovered, “could have cast a different light on the investigation’s findings,” as the AP put it.
Elsewhere, the AP has been far more assertive in declaring something a conspiracy theory on the basis of little evidence. It has repeatedly claimed that the “lab-leak” origin theory of SARS-Cov-2, for instance, hasbeen “debunked” and that it was an “outlier theory” that was being proffered “without the weight of evidence.” In recent months, meanwhile, even the Biden administration has acknowledged the potential validity of that theory.
The AP was also among the many news outlets that pushed a false interpretation of a phone call between then-President Trump and a Georgia elections investigator. The news wire claimed to have been told by an anonymous source that Trump had pushed the investigator to “find the fraud,” an assertion it had toretract several months later after listening to the call itself.
Smaller but still substantive errors plagued the news wire during the Trump administration. It wasforced to issue a correction, for instance, after it erroneously reported that then-EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt had met with Dow Chemical CEO Andrew Liveris. The meeting had been scheduled but canceled, the AP learned after publishing the report.
Neither Twitter nor The Associated Press responded to requests for comment on the new partnership.
Twitter in its announcement this week said it “expect[s] our efforts to grow over time and the nature of the work may evolve as we learn, observe, and scale our efforts to provide support across languages and timezones, globally.”
“This program is just one part of our ongoing efforts to help people understand the conversation happening on our service,” it said. “People experience a range of public conversations on Twitter every day, and we’re committed to continuing our work to elevate credible information and context.”
In every place where wearing a mask is “required” by the government, the number of people dying with the Wuhan coronavirus (Covid-19) is substantially higher compared to places where people have returned back to living their normal, pre-covid lives.
In Oregon, for instance, where wearing a mask is something of a fetish, the number of “active cases” of the Chinese Virus is skyrocketing. Since August 24 when Gov. Kate Brown reinstated a statewide mask mandate, Wuhan Flu cases have soared by 73 percent.
“Cases and hospitalizations are at a record high,” Brown admitted in a statement while also praising masks for being really progressive.
“Masks are a quick and simple tool we can immediately deploy to protect ourselves and our families, and quickly help stop further spread of COVID-19,” she added without providing a shred of proof to back these claims.
The situation is similar in South Korea, another mask haven. Despite 99 percent mask compliance, Fauci Flu cases in the Asian country have seen record highs for the past three months straight.
Singapore is also seeing a spike in new cases thanks to its mask mandate. That country is on day 527 of a continuous mask mandate and 82 percent of its population is now “fully vaccinated,” and yet sicknesses and deaths are higher than they have ever been since the beginning of the plandemic.
“Pretty incredible feat of media gaslighting that no one is asking politicians and experts how they can continue justifying mandates,” tweeted a person who shared these and other statistics for the world to see.
Unmasked Orange County is doing better than masked Los Angeles County
In the United States, Minnesota, of all places, is currently seeing the most new cases emerge compared to any other state – including Florida, which we were all told would be a giant morgue thanks to Gov. Ron DeSantis’ pro-freedom policies.
It turns out that DeSantis was right, and whoever runs Minnesota is wrong. Freedom is the best policy, and it just so happens that freedom saves more lives than tyranny ever has.
Orange County, Calif., is another shining example of how freedom is the best way to go. While next-door Los Angeles County brought back its mask mandates and is now pushing vaccine passports, it is seeing much more sickness, misery, and death compared to unmasked Orange County.
“I don’t know if I’ll ever get over that LA mandates masks 2+ months ago, neighboring Orange County didn’t mandate masks, yet the county without a mandate did better and followed the same trajectory,” the same Twitter user wrote about this comparison.
“If sanity & science still existed, we’d be done pretending masks matter.”
Arizona and Nevada offer another side-by-side look at the benefits of freedom over fascism. Fully open and mask-free Arizona, it turns out, is far outperforming the masked Branch Covidian land of Nevada.
And finally, Denmark. The European country recently ended all covid restrictions and returned completely back to normal, and since that time covid itself has all but disappeared.
Once again, freedom is the best remedy. Freedom makes people healthier, happier and more resistant to diseases that spread through the air, as well as those that spread through the government and the mainstream media.
“None of this is to say that mask mandates have no effect,” writes Selwyn Duke for The New American.
“In fact, studies have found that masks become as pathogen-laden Petri dishes on people’s faces, can restrict oxygen intake and induce dangerously high carbon dioxide levels in people’s bloodstreams, may introduce unhealthful plastic microparticles into wearer’s systems, can cause skin problems, may exacerbate anxiety and breathing difficulties in children, and can lead to altered facial development in kids due to continuous mouth-breathing.”
Chinese Virus tyranny is the real pandemic. To keep up with the latest, visit Fascism.news.
BY SCOTT PELLEYOCTOBER 4, 2021 / 7:32 AM / CBS NEWS
Her name is Frances Haugen. That is a fact that Facebook has been anxious to know since last month when an anonymous former employee filed complaints with federal law enforcement. The complaints say Facebook’s own research shows that it amplifies hate, misinformation and political unrest—but the company hides what it knows. One complaint alleges that Facebook’s Instagram harms teenage girls. What makes Haugen’s complaints unprecedented is the trove of private Facebook research she took when she quit in May. The documents appeared first, last month, in the Wall Street Journal. But tonight, Frances Haugen is revealing her identity to explain why she became the Facebook whistleblower.
Frances Haugen: The thing I saw at Facebook over and over again was there were conflicts of interest between what was good for the public and what was good for Facebook. And Facebook, over and over again, chose to optimize for its own interests, like making more money.
Frances Haugen is 37, a data scientist from Iowa with a degree in computer engineering and a Harvard master’s degree in business. For 15 years she’s worked for companies including Google and Pinterest.
Frances Haugen: I’ve seen a bunch of social networks and it was substantially worse at Facebook than anything I’d seen before.
Scott Pelley: You know, someone else might have just quit and moved on. And I wonder why you take this stand.
Frances Haugen: Imagine you know what’s going on inside of Facebook and you know no one on the outside knows. I knew what my future looked like if I continued to stay inside of Facebook, which is person after person after person has tackled this inside of Facebook and ground themselves to the ground.
Scott Pelley: When and how did it occur to you to take all of these documents out of the company?
Frances Haugen: At some point in 2021, I realized, “Okay, I’m gonna have to do this in a systemic way, and I have to get out enough that no one can question that this is real.”
Frances Haugen
She secretly copied tens of thousands of pages of Facebook internal research. She says evidence shows that the company is lying to the public about making significant progress against hate, violence and misinformation. One study she found, from this year, says, “we estimate that we may action as little as 3-5% of hate and about 6-tenths of 1% of V & I [violence and incitement] on Facebook despite being the best in the world at it.”
Scott Pelley: To quote from another one of the documents you brought out, “We have evidence from a variety of sources that hate speech, divisive political speech and misinformation on Facebook and the family of apps are affecting societies around the world.”
Frances Haugen: When we live in an information environment that is full of angry, hateful, polarizing content it erodes our civic trust, it erodes our faith in each other, it erodes our ability to want to care for each other, the version of Facebook that exists today is tearing our societies apart and causing ethnic violence around the world.
‘Ethnic violence’ including Myanmar in 2018 when the military used Facebook to launch a genocide.
Frances Haugen told us she was recruited by Facebook in 2019. She says she agreed to take the job only if she could work against misinformation because she had lost a friend to online conspiracy theories.
Frances Haugen: I never wanted anyone to feel the pain that I had felt. And I had seen how high the stakes were in terms of making sure there was high quality information on Facebook.
At headquarters, she was assigned to Civic Integrity which worked on risks to elections including misinformation. But after this past election, there was a turning point.
Frances Haugen: They told us, “We’re dissolving Civic Integrity.” Like, they basically said, “Oh good, we made it through the election. There wasn’t riots. We can get rid of Civic Integrity now.” Fast forward a couple months, we got the insurrection. And when they got rid of Civic Integrity, it was the moment where I was like, “I don’t trust that they’re willing to actually invest what needs to be invested to keep Facebook from being dangerous.”
Facebook says the work of Civic Integrity was distributed to other units. Haugen told us the root of Facebook’s problem is in a change that it made in 2018 to its algorithms—the programming that decides what you see on your Facebook news feed.
Frances Haugen: So, you know, you have your phone. You might see only 100 pieces of content if you sit and scroll on for, you know, five minutes. But Facebook has thousands of options it could show you.
The algorithm picks from those options based on the kind of content you’ve engaged with the most in the past.
Frances Haugen: And one of the consequences of how Facebook is picking out that content today is it is — optimizing for content that gets engagement, or reaction. But its own research is showing that content that is hateful, that is divisive, that is polarizing, it’s easier to inspire people to anger than it is to other emotions.
Scott Pelley: Misinformation, angry content– is enticing to people and keep–
Frances Haugen: Very enticing.
Scott Pelley:–keeps them on the platform.
Frances Haugen: Yes. Facebook has realized that if they change the algorithm to be safer, people will spend less time on the site, they’ll click on less ads, they’ll make less money.
Haugen says Facebook understood the danger to the 2020 Election. So, it turned on safety systems to reduce misinformation—but many of those changes, she says, were temporary.
Frances Haugen: And as soon as the election was over, they turned them back off or they changed the settings back to what they were before, to prioritize growth over safety.
And that really feels like a betrayal of democracy to me.
Facebook says some of the safety systems remained. But, after the election, Facebook was used by some to organize the January 6th insurrection. Prosecutors cite Facebook posts as evidence—photos of armed partisans and text including, “by bullet or ballot restoration of the republic is coming!” Extremists used many platforms, but Facebook is a recurring theme.
After the attack, Facebook employees raged on an internal message board copied by Haugen. “…Haven’t we had enough time to figure out how to manage discourse without enabling violence?” We looked for positive comments and found this, “I don’t think our leadership team ignores data, ignores dissent, ignores truth…” but that drew this reply, “welcome to Facebook! I see you just joined in November 2020… wehave been watching… wishy-washy actions of company leadership for years now.” “…Colleagues… cannot conscience working for a company that does not do more to mitigate the negative effects of its platform.”
Scott Pelley: Facebook essentially amplifies the worst of human nature.
Frances Haugen: It’s one of these unfortunate consequences, right? No one at Facebook is malevolent, but the incentives are misaligned, right? Like, Facebook makes more money when you consume more content. People enjoy engaging with things that elicit an emotional reaction. And the more anger that they get exposed to, the more they interact and the more they consume.
That dynamic led to a complaint to Facebook by major political parties across Europe. This 2019 internal report obtained by Haugen says that the parties, “…feel strongly that the change to the algorithm has forced them to skew negative in their communications on Facebook… leading them into more extreme policy positions.”
Scott Pelley: The European political parties were essentially saying to Facebook the way you’ve written your algorithm is changing the way we lead our countries.
Frances Haugen: Yes. You are forcing us to take positions that we don’t like, that we know are bad for society. We know if we don’t take those positions, we won’t win in the marketplace of social media.
Evidence of harm, she says, extends to Facebook’s Instagram app.
Scott Pelley: One of the Facebook internal studies that you found talks about how Instagram harms teenage girls. One study says 13.5% of teen girls say Instagram makes thoughts of suicide worse; 17% of teen girls say Instagram makes eating disorders worse.
Frances Haugen: And what’s super tragic is Facebook’s own research says, as these young women begin to consume this– this eating disorder content, they get more and more depressed. And it actually makes them use the app more. And so, they end up in this feedback cycle where they hate their bodies more and more. Facebook’s own research says it is not just the Instagram is dangerous for teenagers, that it harms teenagers, it’s that it is distinctly worse than other forms of social media.
Facebook said, just last week, it would postpone plans to create an Instagram for younger children.
Last month, Haugen’s lawyers filed at least 8 complaints with the Securities and Exchange Commission which enforces the law in financial markets. The complaints compare the internal research with the company’s public face—often that of CEO Mark Zuckerberg—who testified remotely to Congress last March.
Mark Zuckerberg testimony on March 25: We have removed content that could lead to imminent real-world harm. We have built an unprecedented third-party fact checking program. The system isn’t perfect. But it is the best approach that we have found to address misinformation in line with our country’s values.
One of Frances Haugen’s lawyers, is John Tye. He’s the founder of a Washington legal group, called “Whistleblower Aid.”
Scott Pelley: What is the legal theory behind going to the SEC? What laws are you alleging have been broken?
John Tye: As a publicly-traded company, Facebook is required to not lie to its investors or even withhold material information. So, the SEC regularly brings enforcement actions, alleging that companies like Facebook and others are making material misstatements and omissions that affect investors adversely.
Scott Pelley: One of the things that Facebook might allege is that she stole company documents.
John Tye: The Dodd-Frank Act, passed over ten years ago at this point, created an Office of the Whistleblower inside the SEC. And one of the provisions of that law says that no company can prohibit its employees from communicating with the SEC and sharing internal corporate documents with the SEC.
Frances Haugen: I have a lot of empathy for Mark. and Mark has never set out to make a hateful platform. But he has allowed choices to be made where the side effects of those choices are that hateful, polarizing content gets more distribution and more reach.
Facebook declined an interview. But in a written statement to 60 Minutes it said, “every day our teams have to balance protecting the right of billions of people to express themselves openly with the need to keep our platform a safe and positive place. We continue to make significant improvements to tackle the spread of misinformation and harmful content. To suggest we encourage bad content and do nothing is just not true.”
“If any research had identified an exact solution to these complex challenges, the tech industry, governments, and society would have solved them a long time ago.”
Facebook is a $1 trillion company. Just 17 years old, it has 2.8 billion users, which is 60% of all internet-connected people on Earth. Frances Haugen plans to testify before Congress this week. She believes the federal government should impose regulations.
Frances Haugen: Facebook has demonstrated they cannot act independently Facebook, over and over again, has shown it chooses profit over safety. It is subsidizing, it is paying for its profits with our safety. I’m hoping that this will have had a big enough impact on the world that they get the fortitude and the motivation to actually go put those regulations into place. That’s my hope.
Produced by Maria Gavrilovic and Alex Ortiz. Broadcast associate, Michelle Karim. Edited by Michael Mongulla.
By Alicia Powe Published October 4, 2021 at 2:47pm
Without warning, Facebook crashed on Monday morning.
It’s unclear what caused today’s global outage which saw Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram all crash.
The shutdown comes after a former Facebook product manager turned “whistleblower” leaked tens of thousands of internal documents published in a blockbuster series of reports published byThe Wall Street Journal.
Facebook executives admit in the internal memos that Zuckerberg “hobbled” America to get vaccinated, facilitates human trafficking and that the company’s subsidiary, Instagram, is harmful to teenagers among the trove of damning information leaked.
However, the whistleblower, 37-year old data scientist Frances Haugen who led Facebook’s Civic Integrity and Misinformation Group starting in 2019, was the chief censor on the social media platform ahead of and during the rigged 2020 election.
Former Facebook product manager Frances Haugen, revealed as the source behind tens of thousands of pages of leaked internal company research.
Unlike whistleblowers who have previously exposed big tech, Haugen is conspicuously being championed by the mainstream media.
While the latest leaked memos confirm complaints repeatedly leveled against Facebook, the latest expose is suspected to be psy-op contrived by Facebook to conglomerate more power with the help of the federal government.
Facebook executives “see people are leaving Facebook. They’re going to GETTR, they’re going to Telegram. They’re going to all these other places. They’re sharing Rumble,” Human Event’sJack Posobeic told Steve Bannon on Monday. “She was the head censor on FB during the election of 2020. Yet she is going to come out and act like she’s a whistleblower? No.
Haugen is controlled opposition, Posobeic warns.
“She’s realizing the only way to do this is with legislative action. They want the government to step in and they are going to use brute force. They are going to say the only way to fix this, of course, is going to be government action for the ‘greater good,’” he said. “Think of any of the whistleblowers who have come forward from Facebook, Google, Pinterest, from Project Veritas – those are the real whistleblowers. The people who lose their jobs, get lawsuits, get ruined. There’s guys behind bars. Real whistleblowers don’t get thrown on 60 minutes — this is an operation”
Zuckerberg has yet to comment publicly on the slew of allegations published since Sept. 13.Instead, in recent weeks the CEO has posted videos of himself sailing and fencing on his own profile.
Facebook struggles to quell uproar over Instagram’s impact on teens
>>Mike Isaac, Sheera Frenkel and Ryan Mac, The New York Times
Published: 2021-10-02 11:22:49 BdST
FILE – Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive of Facebook, testifies with the House Financial Services Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, Oct 23, 2019. The social network has been all hands on deck as it grapples with revelations that it knew the harmful effects its Instagram photo-sharing app was having on teenagers. (Eric Thayer/The New York Times)
Over the past few weeks, top Facebook executives assembled virtually for a series of emergency meetings.
In one gathering last weekend, a half-dozen managers — including Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, and Nick Clegg, Facebook’s vice president of global affairs — discussed pausing the development of an Instagram service for children ages 13 and under, said two people briefed on the meeting. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg weighed in to approve the decision, the people said.
The meetings continued this week, with a larger group that included Facebook’s “Strategic Response” teams, which are overseen by Clegg and chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg, the people said. The executives debated what to do about internal research around teenagers and Instagram, they said, and decided to publicly release some information but annotate it to add context.
Facebook has been in an uproar over the past few weeks, which the meetings were held to quell. The tumult began after The Wall Street Journal published a series of articles last month that showed Facebook knew about the harms of its services, including teenage girls saying that Instagram made them feel worse about themselves. The articles were based on a trove of Facebook documents, which were leaked by an unidentified whistleblower.
The revelations immediately set off a wave of criticism from regulators and lawmakers, many of whom moved swiftly to call the company to account. As scrutiny mounted, Facebook delayed the Instagram service for children. On Thursday, Antigone Davis, Facebook’s global head of safety, was questioned for more than two hours by lawmakers about the mental and emotional toll its services could take on kids.
Inside Facebook, top executives have been engulfed by the crisis, with the fallout spreading through parts of the company and disrupting its “Youth Group,” which oversees research and development for children’s products such as Messenger Kids, according to interviews with a dozen current and former employees, who were not authorised to speak publicly.
To navigate the controversy, Zuckerberg and Sandberg have approved decisions on how to respond but have deliberately kept out of the public eye, said two people with knowledge of the meetings. The company has leaned on its “Strategic Response” teams, which include communications and public relations employees.
The effort has been so time-consuming that several projects due to be completed around this time have been postponed, said people with knowledge of the company’s plans.
But some of Facebook’s containment has at times backfired with its own workers. This week, the company downplayed the internal research on which the Journal had partly based its articles, suggesting that the findings were limited and imprecise. That angered some employees who had worked on the research, three people said. They have congregated on group chats to decry the characterisations as unfair, and some have privately threatened to quit.
In one group text message chain shared with The New York Times, Facebook data scientists and researchers discussed how they were being “embarrassed” by their own employer. On a company message board, one employee wrote in a post this week: “They are making a mockery of the research.”
“Facebook’s UX research team is one of the best in the industry,” said Sahar Massachi, a Facebook engineer who worked on election integrity and left the company in 2019. “Instead of attacking their employees, Facebook should be giving integrity researchers the authority to more fully do their jobs.”
The furore is unlikely to die down. On Sunday, the whistleblower who leaked the internal research and who is a former Facebook employee is set to reveal her identity and discuss the documents on “60 Minutes.” She will then appear at a Senate hearing Tuesday to testify about what she discovered while conducting research at Facebook.
Kevin McAlister, a Facebook spokesperson, said the company has been “under intense scrutiny, and it only makes sense that we’ve built teams to streamline internal and external responses, as well as for those teams to help fast-track fixes in areas where we need to improve.”
Since the Journal articles were published starting Sept 13, Facebook’s “Strategic Response” teams, which have handled many crises in recent years, have grappled with responses. The teams, led by company veterans Tucker Bounds and Molly Cutler and acting under the direction of Clegg, sought input from Facebook’s top researchers, the people said. Facebook then pushed back with blog posts that said the Journal articles were inaccurate and lacked context.
Executives also convened to discuss the future of research at Facebook, said two people briefed on the calls. Some questioned whether the social network should continue conducting research on its products because they said companies such as Apple did not do similar user studies. Clegg supported continuing the research, the people said, and others ultimately agreed.
Mosseri also reached out to employees to assuage fears about the company’s products for teenagers. In an internal post last month about “Teen Well-being on Instagram,” he said he was “proud” that the company did the research featured in the Journal article and added “that we invest heavily in safety and integrity.”
But some employees said the post, which was shared with the Times, did little to ease their concerns.
“If Instagram can cause 3% of our users to report strongly negative thoughts (depression, anxiety, self-harm), I think that’s a problem worth looking into,” one employee wrote in a widely circulated internal note. “Our policies of covering up this kind of research are creating difficult political, regulatory and legal problems for the company.”
Zuckerberg and Sandberg were both briefed on and approved the decisions made over the past few weeks, but have been publicly absent to keep away from negative press, said two employees.
Zuckerberg last week posted a video of himself fencing with Olympic gold medalists, shot through the frames of new sunglasses that Facebook and Ray-Ban worked on together that can record videos. On Wednesday, Sandberg posted a story about small businesses in the United Arab Emirates on her Facebook page.
Some projects have been tabled while executives deal with the fallout. An initiative to introduce an election oversight committee has been delayed, said two people with knowledge of the effort.
On Wednesday, after the meetings with the “Strategic Response” teams and other executives, Facebook publicly released two research reports on which the Journal had partly based its stories, before the Senate hearing Thursday.
Facebook annotated the reports, appearing to downplay the results. Next to one slide in the research that said “teens who struggle with mental health say Instagram makes it worse,” the company added that the headline was imprecise. Instead, it wrote, “The headline should be clarified to be: ‘Teens who have lower life satisfaction more likely to say Instagram makes their mental health or the way they feel about themselves worse than teens who are satisfied with their lives.’”
After the annotations became public, Facebook researchers messaged one another in disbelief, said two employees. Many felt that the notes threw them — and their methodology — under the bus, the people said.
Facebook has also moved to stem future leaks.
One Facebook researcher said a colleague was contacted by the legal team in the past week and was asked about a research report that he published more than two years ago. The legal team appeared to be hunting for any potentially incriminating research that might be shared with reporters, he said.
His manager had advised him not to run any queries searching for specific terms on his old work or do anything that could appear suspicious, he said.
Now, he said he was told, was a good time to take a vacation.
The Trailblazing Patriot 