rc3 2021 preroll now here @c-base Herald: The Facebook files last year, Harvard graduated and Facebook employe, FH enhanded huge internal Facebook documents to, among others, newspapers, journals and in fact, the US Senate said it was there to testify about Facebook's conduct. This has gained quite some, quite some attention, but at least in Germany not as ambitious as it should have. And I'm welcoming today. Lena? And Svea? HalIo! Will be giving us the better insight into Facebook files. We believe in having a 30 minute talk by the end about it wasn't in our Q&A after that. So please do continue with your questions on the various channels. They will hopefully miraculously a few of this week to be transferred over the air to our mates, who will be giving us many insights. The screen is yours very much. Svea: OK. Thank you so much. It's great to be here. Sorry, first of all, for my voice because I'm having the Congress flu without Congress laughing. No, just just the bad cold, but no COVID. So everything is fine. Yeah. Thank you so much for welcoming us today. Before we dive into the Facebook files and give you a an exclusive view and inside, let us shortly introduce us. So yeah, I do. Lena, you go first. Lena: I am Lena. I'm an investigative reporter with the WDR Zeitung in Berlin and they mostly work on terror investigations, but also anything complex. So I, of course, jumped on the Facebook files as well. Svea: Yes. And my name is Svea. I also am an investigative reporter working freelance for NDR television, mostly on tech issues. And then Lena and I, we worked very closely together for several weeks or months now on the Facebook files. We were in the team. We had the contact to FH first and Europe and also we had to. We had the chance to look and work very closely with the files, and we did a lot of stories on these issues. And so we thought, this would be a great time to give some behind the scenes views and to tell you a little bit what's not all in all the newspapers, some more details about, FH and also what's in the files and what's not in the files and how they should be read or interpreted. So this is what this is about, and I will now open the presentation on the screen and vanish behind behind it. So yeah, have a great time and Lena will start first. OK, let's see. This is who we are you. We just told you. And then let's go, Lena. Lena: I consider the presentation, Svea: OK, sorry. Then let's just get to make sure that yes, is it? Yes. Sorry. OK, now this should work. Who is FH? OK. Lena, you go first. Lena: So who is FH? Most of you have seen already, but in the beginning wasn't so clear in September, when, in September 2021, the Wall Street Journal started publishing a series of articles and podcasts under the name of the Facebook Files. The leaker was still anonymous. The reports were riveting because these journalists from the Wall Street Journal had were using hundreds and thousands of internal documents from Facebook Internal Employee Network, and only after a few weeks it was announced that the leaker will cooperate with Congress and the SEC, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and reveal their identity and. By then, we were already talking to Frances in video call, and she appeared on the screen as a very normal woman, our age with headphones and on her couch. And until October, the beginning of October, we knew her under a codename. So until she really revealed her identity, she was also using a code name with us as journalists. And. Yeah, we learned that that she was 37 years old, she was born in Iowa. And both her parents are professors, but her mother later became a priest. And Frances went on to study electrical computer engineering at a small college named Olin College in Massachusetts, and she later became a data engineer and product manager for Google, mainly working on Google books. Then she got a job at Yelp and Pinterest. And then in 2018, she got offered a job at Facebook. And first she was very hesitant. She told us because of Facebook, the reputation for being an engine of medicalization and because of the personal experience. Frances, how happened to her friends? And this is a clip from our interview last year. video plays Yeah, let's try to do what I want to do to what you do. So I came into Facebook. I was asked by Facebook to take stock of mobile to give a platform exclusively outage and point system. It has the internet become easy to talk to? That is yes. No, Oh my God, this problem is still going to feel so much larger than you might otherwise. Video ends Lena: So as soon as we heard when she arrived at Facebook, the disenchantment or the the problems she saw started immediately because immediately she saw that. What she had thought of Facebook as an engine of radicalization was even bigger. And with her personal experience, just to explain that in a few years back, she got very sick and she had an assistant who later became almost like a brother, a very close friend, and she lost him to the rabbit hole. His journey started. Yeah, on normal social media sites and that 4chan and let him through the of conspiracy. And she told her that she was shocked, that she lost him and that he was unreachable for facts. At some point, she wasn't able to have a conversation with him anymore. So when she got offered the job and was able to do the job and the integrity method, the team at Facebook that was formed to protect the US elections and working on civic integrity. She really thought that you could make a change. But she realized, that the companies, she said, didn't want to change, although she really admired her coworkers. He said they were really smart and creative people. But she said the leadership didn't want to listen. And so in the end, after about two years, she became a whistleblower. And when you talk to her today. You can see that it seems like she's the perfect person to do that. She seems really at ease with her role, and she's found her role also to be in the public and to put a face on the whistleblowing. She says her both parents are professors, and it feels very natural to her to sit and explain things to people. And that's what she does now as a teenager. She's really touring the world to get her message out. And also we learn that she has a photographic memory, a very good memory, and that she's financially independent because she invested in crypto in the early days. So, yeah, she seems to be. Yeah, yeah. Whistleblower, almost. And gone, yeah. But let's go to her motivated way in the end, she wanted to become a whistleblower. So these two clips from our interview again, she told us that when she was at Facebook: "I was faced. So this is hard. Patients, I was faced with information that I believe put many, maybe a million or 10 million lives on the line. I sat there and you were staring down at a situation where you believe maybe 10 million people could die over the next 20 years. And I knew that I had the information that could potentially face in a fraction of those life. She has to do something." And now she says: "It's not about bad people or bad content at Facebook, it's about a system. And like either the organization incentives or the incentives at Facebook, they are they. They are wrong. They are skewed." And then also, she says that she failed to change the system from within, and she realized: "This problem was so much larger than even I thought it was. I kept trying and trying. At some point, I read the realization that there was enough systematic problems that I would have at some point to figure out how to bring the information to the public." So she tried actually to make her complaints heard in the company, but that she had the the she was under the impression, that the leadership didn't want to listen. Svea: Yes. And I think with this things you have now learned about FH I think if you know all this things you can understand the leak much better and this is what we're going to do now. So we will dive into the Files. And if you have all this in mind, so what was her motivation, then you will now see and understand better, why some things are in the Files and why some things aren't. Because you now know why she did what she did and what type of person so roughly she is. So let's go to the revelation timeline just just quickly here. In December 2020, she worked into the Civic Integrity Team, but this team got dissolved and there was a Wall Street Journal reporter and he saw a chance and asked all these, all the people who worked there, and he tried to get interviews with them. And he also got the chance to meet FH and probably the and the podcast from Wall Street Journal he tells the story that they were talking to each other. And yeah, probably this also. Yeah. Get confidence that there's somebody she probably could talk to, and we assume that then she started collecting the files, but this stays blurry. So maybe she started earlier. But this is something not which is not really known and which is not really answered clearly. So she's always when we asked her, she was always speaking from summer. So summer, summer, maybe this is the summer 21, then the Wall Street Journal story just got out. And I think what's also interesting here to see is, that you have this time period from December to September. So more than half a year from the first contact, from the reporter to the leakage. So I think this is quite interesting. And then you have the filing to the S.E.C. and to U.S. Congress via whistleblower AID. We will talk about this later, too. And then things get rush and then things get IQ each or then the everything gets very fast. So there you have the filing, then you have the revealing of the identity. And on the 5th of October, she is speaking to Congress and then all the publications maybe you all have read or some of them, who you have read went out. So it's pretty interesting to see now. Oh yeah. And then we also implemented when we come and place, what was in the beginning of October. This is where we broke the first story. And then formed the EU consortium. So we thought, maybe what's most what's probably most interesting for you here, guys, is not the question what's in the files? We'll tell about this later, too, about what? What's not in the files? Maybe this is the more interesting question. And so to get the answer to that, it's really important to understand the nature of the files where the files come from and about what kind of files we are talking when we're speaking about the Facebook files. And as Lena already mentioned, FH was a data scientist within Facebook. She worked with the Civic Integrity Team and later she worked with counter-espionage. So she was regular Facebook employee. She had she hadn't have a high rank or something. She wasn't part of the board or she wasn't an executive person. So of course, she had limited access to documents. But yeah, luckily for her, Facebook maintains a quite transparent approach regarding its own research and a lot of other relevant information, probably a lot more transparent than other companies. So you, you have and Facebook, you have some kind of internal Facebook, which is called a workplace and and workplace. You find a vast, vast amount of internal research reports and people are discussing this research with each other. And but I must admit so in these research that you have a lot of technical terms and you have a lot of teams speaking to each other, the researches made for Facebook employees. Of course, it's full of abbreviations or yeah, terms you can't or hardly understand as an outsider, so we will get into that later. So to give you a glimpse of how is a file, how what did we see when we dived into it? So you have these totally unstructured PDF documents with more than an estimated 10000 pages? They all photographed. And there you have this research and also these discussions and you see here where I did the pink arrows. You can see how it looks and it looks a little bit like Facebook. You have groups of groups and you have comments, you have smileys and then you have these black redactions, which were made later on because all these fires were made for Congress. And so all the names were redacted. And this this is pretty important to know when you think about what the files don't tell. So what's missing? As I told you, that FH, she was part of the executive board, so it is not in the files what Mark Zuckerberg or other key executive know. As these are not reports directly to Mark Zuckerberg as these are research reports for the internal network. So they don't say much about leadership or about decisions from leadership or what was discussed by leadership. Sometimes you have these postings in the internal Facebook where leadership is discussing something, so you get an idea or a glimpse what the board or what high rank execute thoughts. But this is basically something what the files are not telling. Then the Facebook files don't provide any context. And this is something I've ... what also FH thinks, what's yeah, really is the reason why she gave all these files to journalists, because she hoped that we could provide context, because there are no information on who did the report. So usually the authors redacted. So you can't see. Is he a good researcher? Is he long working with his book or what? What has he got for an education? So you don't know how reliable they are or what happened before the study, or after all? And I think this is very important and we especially saw this. I don't know if you remember the reporting on the Instagram study and when you read the Instagram study very closely, you see that there that they are talking about a dozen people who they have conducted interviews, qualitative interviews with. And this is a research which is highly qualitative and not quantitative, so it's not representative. And so this is very important if you look at the files that you look at the numbers, how many people with how many people are study is conducted or with how many accounts or how many? Yeah, what what is it really about? And then you also see in the file that there are specific areas which are very well represented, like hate speech. I think this is an issue, FH worked a lot on it and the civic integrity teams at other areas are missing or not represented. So, for example, I'm very interested in fake accounts. So this was the first thing I did when I was sweating through the files and what is what research is down fake accounts. There is some research, of course, but yeah, I was I was saying, I was missing content and I thought, Oh, there need to be more or about scam. I don't know if you know, love scams, though. I did not find anything about this or click farms, then engagement numbers. They are some engagement numbers, but not that much. So I I can only speculate about why there are some areas very well represented in the files, and some aren't. But I think probably this are different reasons. So on the one hand, FH, she had a specific time, limited time to get these files and also probably she had limited areas where she could go and read these documents. And also, of course, these are internal research. This is entirely research. These are internal studies. So there are only studies that facebook employes start. This was some kind we definitely should investigate, and if there's no if they didn't feel the urge to investigate it, of course they can't be a file. So these are some reasons, I think, why some areas are missing. OK, so now laugh let's get to the good part. So what's In the files? I think some of you probably have read or heard about the Wall Street Journal revelations, so we do not want to dive into this because this is broadly known about, that celebrities were treated differently, that human trafficking goes on on Facebook. I don't know who watched Jan Bömermann. He began talking about this on that Instagram was toxic for teens or Mexican drug cartels using Facebook, or that Facebook changed the news algorithm and polarization got worse. So this are the this is where the first revelations. So let's talk about growth. So this was something I was looking into it's, because I'm pretty interested in the whole fake accounts area. So I looked into growth and I found it pretty interesting because Facebook is always speaking about growth and that they are growing and making more and more profits. And of course, this is true. But if you look through the files and you can see that young users, especially users under the age of 25, that these are the numbers are decreasing. And that's what you can see here pretty closely. You have the red line and then you have the blue line. These are symbolizing the younger users under 25. And even in COVID times where you have on the right corners, you see this spike and all the other age groups, especially, I think people above 50 got highly interested in Facebook during COVID. Now it's just shocking. So you have every age group is highly is using Facebook more during COVID, but not so that people under 25. And this is pretty interesting because of the filing for the FCC, the Börsenaufsicht and there because what is with the advertisers and is Facebook really telling the truth when they always talking about growth and profits. Then I think hate speech pretty important. And there are a lot of case studies about especially poorer countries or high risk countries and that they are the polarization goes on and that Facebook is not taking enough measures, especially for sub languages on the far right for Arabic countries or Asian countries or African countries. Even worse, where you have often a lot of dialects and a lot of languages, and that there are not many people doing, for example, content moderation. And one of the probably most difficult documents, but I think one of the most interesting ones, this one. So sorry, I think you can't read a lot, but I will explain as this report, it's called the OpEx report. And it's it's really a long document with a lot of numbers, but I liked it very much because there were so many numbers and it was quite an official document and not only a study of one researcher did, and in his opex report, you can see the missed proportion and spending money to fight misinformation between English speaking countries like the U.S. and ArW, this the rest of world. So you see here on the document, on the right, you see on the first column you see misinformation and then you have these rows and then on the row, the right corner, you can see that money or man hours. Is this transferred into man hours that 84 percent man hours? Here is the first Quartal quarter of 2020 that 84 percent was spent for misinformation, and rest of world is 16 percent, which if you compare the U.S. to the rest of the world, you can see definitely see where the focus, where Facebook focus lies. And this of this also was one document FH pointed us through and said, You have to check the numbers and then you can see what I mean when I say they are, yeah, profit and growth is more important for Facebook than human lives. I hope this very yeah, this document makes this clear. OK, yeah. What does Facebook say? Facebook says, No. We're doing a lot of course and everything and the people using Facebook. This is really important to us. OK, and now for the last part, I give, yeah, Lena will tell you something more about the fight within. Lena: Yeah, thank you very much. So what is really interesting to us is to see the discussion in the work culture and the discussions among among teams and among employees. And you could see that in the chat, that was going on, especially under some of the studies. And it was kind of confirming our impression that Facebook, that there was a lot of debate, internal debate and that there was a lot of frustration among employees because as we have counted, there were at least 11 major leaks since 2016. Most of them remained anonymous. But there were also some that happened that went public. For example, Sophie Zangh went public in April 2000 and 2021, and there was just a few months before FH came out and became public and made that made it public that she had leaked documents. Zangh has not leaked any documents that she had talked to reporters. And and and she hurt her when she entered her employment with Facebook. And she said she posted a batch post this kind of part of the internal exchanges, and we found many of these batch posts. And she posted, I found multiple blatant attempts by foreign national governments to abuse our platform and that failed to mislead their own citizenry and cost international news on multiple occasions. And she was just as FH, she was concerned with Facebook lack of content moderation and lack of enforcement of community standards outside of the U.S.. And so this just to show you that in term of debate was very, very public internally. So I mean, we found another batch code. It was called leaving Q&A. This was from May 2000 at from May 2021, and there this person was concerned about hate speech and this person said she couldn't take it anymore just to be an on Facebook employee because she says with so many internal forces propping up the production of hateful and violent content. The task of stopping hate and violence on Facebook starts to feel even more sisyphean than it already is and shaming internal forces, meaning the leadership and this is something that I, this person says, so many internal forces and the leadership. This is something that FH was also really concerned about that. On the one hand, there are people working on combating hate speech and changing the algorithms to make it more a better and safer environment. And then, on the other hand, that there are some forces in that in the company that apparently work against these efforts. And this fight that we could see, could you go back, and this fight that we could see was especially viral after January six, after the storm of the Capitol and their employees were very much discussing and they were very they were furious. And one one person has said, we've been fueling this fire for a long time and we shouldn't be surprised. It's now out of control. So employers are giving Facebook responsibility for the development. And another person said, employers employees should say employees are tired of thoughts and prayers from leadership. We want action. And another person said so many research backed ideas get shut down. We need to do a better job at making decisions from a research perspective, and this is something that's also very close to FH. She said in our interview, she says there are solutions that are there are wonderful employers and wonderful teams, who are working to come up with solutions. But they are they are blocked by leadership out of a for profit interests. And this here's a screenshot of another person saying I'm struggling to match my values to my employment here. I came here hoping to effect change and improve society, but I've seen it atrophy and abdication of responsibility. I'm tired of platitudes. I want action items. We are not a neutral entity, so employee seems to be extremely critical of Facebook. Yeah. And so as a general take away, you could say that we expect to see more leaks from Facebook. We expect to see more whistleblowers coming out of this work culture because people seem to be extremely frustrated. And this is also just to wrap it up. This is Facebook reaction to the Facebook files and the revelation that came out after October 4th after after FH went public at Mark Zuckerberg said this week. And in a message to his employees, he said: "We care deeply about issues like safety, well- being and mental health and the coverage that misrepresents our work and our motive." And Facebook Communications VP John Pernetti said. Even that it was an orchestrated campaign against Facebook and in response to our reporting, he said: "We welcome scrutiny and feedback that these documents are being used to paint a narrative that we hide or that that that was terrible, that we hide or cherry picked data when in fact we do the opposite." So they are they they are kind of blankly refusing FH accusations. But earn a T. What what's happened to FH during this process? I think he was talking to a reporter early on and she was on her own. But when when she started and when when the when the revelations started in The Wall Street Journal, apparently we don't know. And I am sorry, I'm hearing the sound from the c-base, and that's why I was a bit confused. But in the process of leaking documents, she got in contact with the whistleblower aid, which was founded by a former whistleblower, John Tye, and which is a nonprofit organization claiming that no one should have to risk their career or their freedom to follow their conscience. And some of you may know the executive director Libby knew a former CEO of Open Technology Fund, so they helped Frances to making a protected protected disclosure. And she also had lawyers who represent her. They are from Bryson Gillette. That's a consulting firm and law firm founded 2020 by Bill Burton. He was a former spokesman, the deputy spokesman of Obama and the Bryson Gillette, and that is also involved with the Lincoln Project. So they are clearly from the democratic spectrum. And this was also why Facebook could easily make the claim that it was an orchestrated campaign by the Democrats, an orchestrated political campaign. We think that. But let's go on to a more groups involved with Francis just to wrap it up and let us Luminate, which is founded by Pierre Omidyar the founder of eBay, and also Ben Scott been involved there. He's a senior policy adviser for innovation at the U.S. Department of State and Hillary Clinton and was there, and they are cooperating closely on funding. For example, recent tech operating also in the U.S. and Europe. The nonprofit lobbies a lobbying organization that wants to regulate the market for Big Tech. So these organizations, they come from the democratic spectrum. There's no question, but we see that a rethink and our impression was that they were mentioned matching FH interest. So they have kind of the same goal. So they came they came together in the process. Svea: Yeah, really important to see now, OK, what's next? So we have reported on the Facebook Files in Europe, in the U.S., but it's pretty exciting to see. Yeah, what is happening? Is Facebook changing something or is there any regulation coming? So of course, the future is still open and not written, but to give you a little bit a glimpse what happened after the 7th of October? So then, yeah, FH went on some kind of tour through Europe? Though she was a London, she was at this bar Lisbon, and in November she went to Berlin, to Brussels and to Paris. So why did she do that? Why did she travel from Puerto Rico to the U.S. and then from the U.S. through Europe? I think every three days another city, it was a tour like kind of a rock star or something. Why did she do this? Yeah, it is. Because, yeah, they she clearly has some kind of agenda. She definitely wants to change. And she did not want to throw a lot of documents in the internet and then hide in the castle or somewhere else. She definitely wanted something. Yeah, she she wanted action. So she had big hopes in Europe because as probably some of you know, here that Digital Services Act is debated. It was debated in the parliament and now it's up to the commission. So hopefully next year, the Digital Services Act will be in place. And yeah, she and also many other groups are hoping for more regulations and control regarding especially content moderation, fiiles and also transparency, so that you can see what is going on on these platforms and in the U.S. the hope lies in Congress and in the SEC . So I think I'm sure they hope that the SEC will have a billion or billion dollar fine on Facebook and also probably pushes for more regulation. And the discussion centers around that news, getting more control of that data that that there's more transparency and probably that also there's more taxation, probably on digital ads just yet to make the business model harder. Because I think also this is only one way to come by is yeah, to to do something about the business model. OK. So yeah, we hope you enjoyed our presentation and we yeah, I want to thank you for listening and also big thanks to the team who work for that. And I hope we have another five to 10 minutes for some Q&A. Herald: Yes, thank you. Yes, we have indeed another 10 minutes before we have to prepare for the next talk. Thank you very much for this. These 45 minutes of content Svea laughs very well, you are. You are giving the impression your presentation gives the impression that Facebook is basically watching from within. It's a question when mutiny within the Facebook workforce will break out and that 85 percent of all the content comes from payments for the ugly content and not for the good one. How true is this? How how evil is Facebook compared to other debated evil doers like Telegram or others? What do you think? Svea: I think that, you know, the Facebook files and you have like the feeling that you are in a submarine as you're diving into the Marine, you know, and you start diving underwater and then you go with the light bulb, you know, with one light and then you shed into the dark and this other Facebook files and you can't see what surrounds this. So we definitely. So I think it's it's not fair to say like the whole company is so also it's only fair to say that and, what you can see on the comments, for example, after the storm of the Capitol, where many employees were speaking. So I think it's not that the whole company is rotten from within, but of course, there are parts which are rotten. And this, I think, is shown in the files. I think it's really hard to compare Facebook to Telegram or Google or something because I think a Facebook or Meta, as they now called, it's quite a very unique player on the market. They are. Yeah, they bought Instagram. They bought WhatsApp. You can't compare Facebook or Meta to Telegram because this is a completely different scale. So yeah, that's that's I hope I could. It's a little bit of a philosophical question, so I hope my answer is okay laughs. Herald: I mean, that's OK. You know... Lena: I want to add, I think it's true. What we have, we are only seeing a glimpse of, of course, of some of the internal discussions. But it gives us an impression. And I think the impression I would see, I would say, is right that there are a lot of frustration among the complaints because what Facebook says on the outside, we are good. We are connecting people. Whatever their slogan is, it is not. It seems to be not confirmed by by many employees. They say they think just as Frances Haugen of power and things that the company putting profit over safety. And there may be that there are probably a lot of employees that are super happy to work at Facebook and they don't see it. And I think that they have amazing perks that they get at the office. You know, they have little kitchen. They have. I mean, it seems to be a wonderful place to work if you care about this issue. It seems that many, many people who really, really care about these issues, such as hate speech, such as the democratic processes such as a foreign influence on elections, and they seem to be very frustrated. So as I said, I expect more whistleblowers. I expect more leaks to come. Herald: Hmm. Lena: And also, it's a structural thing just to end this and it's a structural thing there. When you compare it, for example, to Twitter, it seems to be that Twitter is doing many things much better than than than Facebook. But as I said, you can't really compare. But there is a discussion within the Facebook players about a firewall between those parts of the company that are enforcing policies, internal policies and those parts of the company who are responsible for that, for the numbers and who are selling ads, for example. And apparently, it's Twitter. There's a there's a firewall. And at Facebook, there's no firewall. So the same people who are selling adds are also making exceptions for political actors on, on or on certain behaviors. And that's this is a structural thing that frustrated many people. Herald: No Chinese wall. I see. I am getting signals that we have only three minutes left. A very short question away, short answer from our technical audience. You talked about the internal platform workplace, Facebook's internal knowledge base. It would, of course, be interesting to see how user level access controls, encription, white's management work on this platform is anything in the leaks about that? No. Lena: No. Only research reports only the vast amount of research reports. Herald: Mm hmm. But this vast amounts seem to be accessible. OK? Somebody is waving, Waving us Goodbye. I see. Thank you so much. Interesting insight. Interesting updates, folks. Follow this issue. It's not over. Things will be coming. Thank you, Lena. Thank you, Svea. I wish you good health through the winter and thank you again Svea laughs for your marital effort to you. Svea, Lena: Thank you. I think you see by everything is licensed under CC by 4.0. And it is all for the community 2.0 and for everybody. Subtitles created by c3subtitles.de in the year 2022. Join, and help us!