By Jeff Horwitz and Deepa Seetharaman
As footage of a pro-Trump mob ransacking the U.S. Capitol
streamed from Washington, D.C., last Wednesday, Facebook Inc.'s
data scientists and executives saw warning signs of further
trouble.
User reports of violent content jumped more than 10-fold from
the morning, according to documents viewed by The Wall Street
Journal. A tracker for user reports of false news surged to nearly
40,000 reports an hour, about four times recent daily peaks. On
Instagram, the company's popular photo-sharing platform, views
skyrocketed for content from authors in "zero trust" countries,
reflecting potential efforts at platform manipulation by entities
overseas.
Facebook's platforms were aflame, the documents show. One
Instagram presentation, circulated internally and seen by the
Journal, was subtitled "Why business as usual isn't working."
Company leaders feared a feedback loop, according to people
familiar with the matter, in which the incendiary events in
Washington riled up already on-edge social-media users --
potentially leading to more strife in real life.
Facebook ultimately decided on a series of actions over the past
week that, taken together, amount to its most aggressive
interventions against President Trump and his supporters. And they
show the company continuing to grapple with how best to police its
platforms while still allowing for political discussion.
The issues have consumed Facebook for much of the Trump
administration and are likely to persist for the near future, as it
navigates competing criticism from some that it does too little to
curb problematic content and from others that its moderation
efforts veer into censorship.
In the chaotic hours as the Capitol siege unfolded, Facebook
executives were wary of stifling political discussion, consistent
with Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg's longstanding admonition that
the company shouldn't be an arbiter of free speech -- and his
aversion to a showdown with the president.
"Hang in there everyone," wrote Chief Technology Officer Mike
Schroepfer in a post reviewed by the Journal, asking for patience
while the company figured out how best "to allow for peaceful
discussion and organizing but not calls for violence."
"All due respect, but haven't we had enough time to figure out
how to manage discourse without enabling violence?" responded one
employee, one of many unhappy responses that together gathered
hundreds of likes from colleagues. "We've been fueling this fire
for a long time and we shouldn't be surprised that it's now out of
control."
By midafternoon Wednesday, Mr. Zuckerberg and other senior
executives had taken their first steps: Two of Mr. Trump's posts
came down, and Facebook privately designated the U.S. a "temporary
high-risk location" for political violence, according to documents
viewed by the Journal. The designation triggered emergency measures
to limit potentially dangerous discourse on its platforms.
Next, Facebook announced it was banning the president for 24
hours. Internally, employees kept pushing, according to posts seen
by the Journal.
"You may feel like this is not enough, but it's worth stepping
back and remembering that this is truly unprecedented," Mr.
Shroepfer responded early Thursday morning. "Not sure I know the
exact right set of answers but we have been changing and adapting
every day -- including yesterday."
Before the open of business Thursday, Mr. Zuckerberg said
Facebook would extend its ban of Mr. Trump through at least the
inauguration. Later that morning it deleted one of the most active
pro-Trump political groups on Facebook, the #WalkAway Campaign,
which was cited repeatedly for breaking Facebook's rules last year
but never taken down, according to a person familiar with the
situation.
By Monday, Facebook said it would prohibit all content
containing the phrase "stop the steal" -- a slogan popular among
Trump supporters who back his efforts to overturn the election --
and that it would keep the emergency measures that it had activated
the day of the Capitol assault in place through Inauguration
Day.
Mr. Zuckerberg, who has grown more involved in politics over the
last four years, has been personally involved in the decisions,
people familiar with the matter say.
One person familiar with the discussions said the changes were
already being planned but that Wednesday's events "sped it up by
10x."
Facebook declined to comment on its internal deliberations over
the handling of content related to the riot, which left five people
dead.
At a Reuters conference on Monday, Facebook Chief Operating
Officer Sheryl Sandberg said the company has no plans to lift its
Trump ban. While the Capitol mob had mobilized on social media, Ms.
Sandberg said the attack was largely organized on other digital
platforms.
"Our enforcement is never perfect, so I'm sure there were still
things on Facebook," said Ms. Sandberg. "I think these events were
largely organized on platforms that don't have our abilities to
stop hate, don't have our standards and don't have our
transparency."
While niche platforms have surged in popularity among many of
the groups associated with the riot, distortions about the election
that fed the violence have also been prevalent on mainstream
platforms, say analysts including Jared Holt, a visiting research
fellow at the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab who
has tracked extremists' activities related to the election and
transition of power.
Facebook long tried to draw a line -- with mixed success --
between merely provocative content and posts that are likely to
lead to real-world harm. The social media-fueled genocide in
Myanmar, which Facebook in 2018 said it could have done more to
prevent, is perhaps the most stark example of the latter. The
company's decision Wednesday was largely about Mr. Zuckerberg
concluding that Mr. Trump crossed that line.
"We believe that the public has a right to the broadest possible
access to political speech," Mr. Zuckerberg posted on Facebook,
explaining the decision. "But the current context is now
fundamentally different, involving use of our platform to incite
violent insurrection against a democratically elected
government."
He said that "the risks of allowing the President to continue to
use our service during this period are simply too great."
Current and former employees said the company's senior
executives appear to be responding to the shifting political winds.
"The leadership thinks any price they pay on being tougher on Trump
is much less than a few weeks ago, a few months ago," said one
person familiar with the company.
Facebook denied that the coming change in government -- with
Democratic President-elect Joe Biden set to be sworn in on Jan. 20
-- affected its handling of the crisis. "That's not how this
happened," said Facebook spokesman Andy Stone. "The threat of
continued violence and civil unrest was at the core of this
decision."
Facebook executives are aware that the company's decisions will
likely affect employee morale, which they track closely due to
concerns that unhappiness could harm efforts to find and retain
talented employees. Mr. Zuckerberg's refusal to take down Mr.
Trump's post warning, "When the looting starts, the shooting
starts" during last year's Black Lives Matter demonstrations
triggered a virtual walkout and coincided with a nearly 30-point
reduction in employee confidence in Facebook's leadership,
according to the company's internal "pulse" polls. Employee pride
in working at the company declined by a similar amount.
Though the company subsequently applied labels to some of Mr.
Trump's posts, neither measure has fully recovered.
Originally designed for countries where Facebook has been used
to carry out genocide or incite political bloodshed, many of the
techniques deployed this week were first imposed in the U.S.
shortly after the Nov. 3 election -- then gradually lifted as
questions of the vote's outcome were put to rest.
The changes included a number of algorithmic tweaks, including
accelerating the shutdown of comments on threads that were
"starting to have too much hate speech or violence &
incitement" and recommending fewer pages from what it deemed the
"low quality news ecosystem," according to the internal
documents.
Facebook executives had said before the election that they hoped
to avoid using the emergency tools at all. They later described
doing so as a one-off decision.
On Thursday, a presentation about the new measures produced
following the assault on the Capitol defined many as "US2020
Levers, previously rolled back."
Write to Jeff Horwitz at Jeff.Horwitz@wsj.com and Deepa
Seetharaman at Deepa.Seetharaman@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
January 13, 2021 18:16 ET (23:16 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2021 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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