January 6 insurrection and Facebook: Internal docs paint a damning picture

CNN Business — Just days after insurrectionists stormed the Capitol on January 6th, Facebook’s Chief Operational Officer Sheryl Sandberg downplayed her company’s role in what had happened. “After the violence at the Capitol erupted and as we saw continued attempts to organize events to dispute the outcome of the presidential election, we removed content with the phrase ‘stop the steal’ under our Coordinating Harm policy and suspended Trump from our platform.” Facebook also on Friday night published a blog post by its vice president of Integrity, Guy Rosen, about its efforts around the 2020 election. The harm existed at the network level: an individual’s speech is protected, but as a movement, it normalized delegitimization and hate in a way that resulted in offline harm and harm to the norms underpinning democracy.” The analysis does note, however, that once Facebook saw the results of Stop the Steal on January 6th and took action, it was able to deploy measures that stymied the growth of both Stop the Steal and Patriot Party groups. One of the documents she captured, titled “Capitol Protest BTG Response,” was a chart of measures Facebook could take in response to the January 6th attack. Among the potential actions listed in the chart were demoting “content deemed likely to violate our community standards in the areas of hate speech, graphic violence, and violence and incitement.” The page labeled these as “US2020 Levers, previously rolled back.” Those “levers,” as Facebook refers to them, are measures – guardrails – that the company put in place before last year’s Presidential election in an attempt to slow the spread of hate and misinformation on the platform.