Facebook has hurt the US. The real scandal is how it treats the rest of the world.

In 2019, Facebook ran an experiment on Australian users. The company was trialling removing the number of likes on a post in an attempt to “focus more on the quality of the interactions that they’re having on the services” according to Facebook Australia’s Mia Garlick at the time.

The trial was judged to be unsuccessful. Why? Because it failed to encourage people to post more content. This decision, not made public before now, was a throwaway line in one story out of the avalanche of stories about the Facebook Papers, a trove of leaked internal Facebook documents that came from a lawyer representing whistleblower Frances Haugen. The documents were given to nearly 20 publications. 

Dozens of stories and tens of thousands of words have been published by some of the world’s biggest publications in concert (mostly). They give incredible insight into the inner workings and debates of one of the world’s most powerful companies. It’s also far, far too much for the average person to consume, so here is Crikey’s attempt to distil it down. 

While much of the coverage focuses on the United States — both a product of the company’s focus and the geography of the publications chosen to take part — the reporting about the rest of the world makes Facebook’s pattern of behaviour even more clear. 

There are numerous examples of Facebook staff raising the alarm that its products were hurting people through misinformation, radicalisation or facilitating real world harm. The internal documents show the tech giant was incapable or unwilling to stop those harms as it doggedly pursued growth and profit. 

Here are just some of the most egregious examples about how it treated countries around the world: 

• Facebook sorts the world’s countries into tiers to decide where to invest content moderation resources. It was predominantly white, Western countries that were given the most attention
• 87% of the company’s budget for time spent on classifying misinformation was earmarked to be spent on the US, leaving 13% for the rest of the world
• Facebook staff said the company has failed to stop the spread of posts inciting violence in Ethiopia, a country that has been in civil war for the last year
• Facebook has more users in India than anywhere else, but it’s only trained its AI systems (used for detecting hate speech, inciting violence and misinformation) on five of the 22 languages. Facebook groups, which had a median size of 140,000 members, were rife with misleading and inflammatory anti-Muslim content, and the company failed to act on some hateful political groups because they feared political backlash
• The company offers its service in more than 110 languages, but only reviews content in 70 and translates its rules into 50. Despite knowing the impact of Facebook in other countries, the tech giant has made their product available there without any of their own systems to mitigate real world harm
• After Apple threatened to take Facebook’s products down from the App Store because they were being used to buy and sell Middle Eastern maids, Facebook found that it was “under-enforcing” on abusive activity. Even now, AP found that searching for maids will bring up photos, ages and prices of maids
• Their proficiency in languages like Egyptian Arabic was so poor that 90% of decisions made by the company’s algorithms and human reviewers against one user, the former BBC’s head of Arabic, were wrong, according to an internal review.
  

The Facebook Papers give a limited view of Facebook’s internal workings. Published documents do not appear to contain the innermost discussions of Mark Zuckerberg and his leadership team. Instead, they include internal chats and documents from the company available to many across the company’s flat structure. 

What we can see is how those staff tried to address real world problems. Highly trained employees with access to information that external researchers could only dream of would diagnose issues, share possible solutions, measure their success or failures. Bureaucratic or technical roadblocks (including a constant fear about how decisions that would stop real world harm might lead to a backlash against the company) seemed to hamstring their efforts in some cases. 

Many of their proposed answers are really tinkering around the edges. As insiders, people whose livelihoods depend on the company, these documents do not show them imagining a world where Facebook doesn’t exist as it does. Staff grappled with the idea that the social network’s fundamental mechanics have warped politics and public discussion. They never countenanced a world in which Facebook might need to be drastically changed, perhaps even in ways that would jeopardise its commercial success, to avoid the platform being used to encourage lies, hatred and violence. The company exists to make sure it keeps existing. Anyone with a different opinion couldn’t work within the confines of the company. 

That is part of the problem with Facebook. It’s an autocracy. One man has the final say over everything. The Facebook Papers make it clear that Mark Zuckerberg is a surprisingly involved CEO. His spectre shapes discussion all through the company, even when he’s not involved. His determination for success — initially measured by user growth, then time spent on the site, then “meaningful social interactions” measured through back-and-forth in user comments — loomed large over all decisions. Those in the civic integrity team, responsible for thinking about how the products were affecting democracy, felt their objectives ran counter to the company’s goals. 

We often talk about how some companies are too big to fail. What the Facebook Papers show is that when it comes to the health and safety of their users, Facebook in its current form is too big to succeed.