- Facebook buried its first transparency report for quarter 2021
- The company is not reporting on its monitoring of hate speech or disinformation
- Facebook's content is not easily understood or monitored by the public.
Above: Illustration by cienpies/DepositPhotos.
BitDepth#1317 for August 30, 2021
Facebook recently issued its first quarterly transparency document, the Widely Viewed Content Report, covering posts in the US for the second quarter of 2021, but it wasn’t the first report that the company produced.
The first was an analysis of Q1 2021, and the social media company didn’t like the results.
After the New York Times (The Times, hereafter) reported the quashing of the first transparency report, a PDF of its findings was released.
Both reports seem largely innocuous, listing top posts and popular domains and links, heavily populated by feel-good video posts and avuncular memes.
But the first report listed the Epoch Times – which Facebook has banned from advertising because of its anti-China misinformation campaigning – as the 19th most popular page for that quarter.
Facebook argues that posts with the most views during Q2 attracted just 0.1 per cent of the volume of views on its social media service.
Posts with a link to external content were in further minority, representing just 12.9 per cent of news feed content in the US.
The majority of posts were viewed from friends and people followed (57 per cent) followed by posts from a viewer’s groups (19.3 per cent).
But it’s important to consider what Facebook is not reporting in its public analysis of content.
The company is not being transparent about the quantity of hate speech, disinformation and political gerrymandering it has identified on its platform, neither has it explained what it has done to limit the visibility and spread of such posts.
CrowdTangle, a Facebook content analysis tool, was used by The Times to understand the spread of a misinformation article by Joseph Mercola, an osteopathic physician in Florida whose false anti-vaccination claims reached more than 400,000 people.
Mercola currently holds the top spot among the Disinformation Dozen, a listing of the twelve most pervasive people who originate 65 per cent of all anti-vaccine messaging on social media.
Withholding its first transparency report isn’t the only action that Facebook has taken to limit access to its inner workings.
In April, the The Times reported that CrowdTangle, which has operated semi-autonomously within Facebook since 2016, was broken up and added to the social network’s integrity team.
Roy Austin Jr, the son of a popular former US ambassador to Trinidad and Tobago is now Facebook’s VP of Civil Rights and Deputy General Counsel.
He spoke at AMCHAM’s Tech Summit on July 06 in a session on “Tech as a force for good,” discussing his work prosecuting hate crimes for the US Department of Justice and the Obama administration’s review of police data as part of the My Brother’s Keeper task force.
“These initiatives resulted in real transparency in policing for police departments, improved life opportunities for those who were touched by My Brother’s Keeper and resulted in a serious look at the risk of reliance on bad and questionable data,” Austin said.
“I see my job as two things, ensure that Facebook does no harm and see that Facebook does good.”
“If we can help mitigate the harm or concerns around issues such as hate speech, false information and bias, Facebook’s stated goal of building a global community that works for all of us comes closer to a reality.”
Such optimistic views are not uncommon among Facebook’s employees and the company vigorously positions itself as a neutral, benign platform for public conversation and comment.
In some ways, it is exactly that, and the toxic environments that flare up on its pages are often an accurate, if depressing barometer of unpalatable public thought and sentiment.
The company’s enthusiasm to be seen as a good guy often make it seem to be an overcompensating villain.
A tweet by Facebook’s Head of News Feed, John Hegeman about CrowdTangle results captured by Times journalist Kevin Roose backfired because Hegeman’s responses depended on data that’s not available to the public.
Unfortunately, because Facebook is also a walled garden, its stated intentions cannot be compared to its actual practice, which is opaque to most observers.
Even the most basic tools of CrowdTangle are not accessible to the general public, and anyone wishing to use the analytics app must jump through significant hoops.
Facebook will, undoubtedly, argue that such restrictions are necessary after the humiliations of Cambridge Analytica, but the company cannot aspire to transparency without offering more a comprehensive, publicly accessible analytical view of its content and behaviour as a business.
If you don’t like Facebook, you don’t have to join, but it’s hard to ignore the influence and power of a publishing platform that brings communication tools to a third of the global population.
By any reasonable measurement of the term, Facebook is a publisher, but it’s one that continues to deny both that role and the responsibility of sharing information on a global scale.
