Apple threatened to pull Facebook from its app store over concerns about online “slave markets.”
On October 22, a consortium of 17 U.S. news organizations began publishing a series of shocking and revealing stories derived from thousands of pages of leaked internal Facebook documents.
The documents, collectively known as the “Facebook Papers”, were obtained by former Facebook data scientist-turned-whistleblower Frances Haugen, and provided to Congress in redacted form by her legal counsel (we’ve got more about her revealing testimony here).
They cover seemingly all aspects of the business, from employees’ anger over the incitement of violence on the platform, to language blind spots that allow hate speech to flourish, to how Facebook protects younger users (or fails to), and whether it can accurately measure its massive audience.
Apple even threatened to pull Facebook and Instagram from its app store over concerns that they were being used as online “slave markets” to trade and sell maids.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has responded to the leaks, saying they “paint a false picture of our company.” “The reality is that we have an open culture that encourages discussion and research on our work so we can make progress on many complex issues that are not specific to just us,” he added.
These most recent leaks come as Facebook is already embroiled in scandal upon scandal. The Facebook Files published by the Wall Street Journal (based on many of the same documents) in September revealed that the company’s response to employee concerns about human trafficking was often “weak,” celebrities were treated differently by the platform, and that it knew Instagram was toxic for teenage girls.
There’s little doubt that more horrifying exposures are on their way. In the meantime, a new book, An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination, gives readers a peek behind the curtain at the decision-makers who engineered the tech giant’s rise, and the flaws within the machine that have thrown it into ignominy…
