In the fall of 2021, members of the US Congress and hundreds of Western journalists gained access to a collection of internal Facebook documents. The wealth of research reports, proposals, presentations and employee conversations would form the basis of dozens of news stories describing Facebook’s own awareness of the real damage resulting from its relentless pursuit of its users’ attention.
Whistleblower Frances Haugen, a former member of the civic integrity team at the company now called Meta, shared the cache of more than 1,300 documents that would come to be known collectively as the Facebook Papers. She would continue to testify before Congress as to their implications. Lawmakers are also reportedly grilling Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri on them.
In November 2021, Gizmodo in partnership with a group of independent experts to review, write and publish the Facebook Papers. This committee serves to advise and oversee our work and to facilitate the responsible disclosure of as many records as possible in the public interest. We believe in the value of open access to these documents. Our collective goal is to minimize any potential harm that may result from the disclosure of certain methods by which Meta addresses sensitive issues such as sex trafficking, misinformation, and voter manipulation. The documents, which have not been previously released, further contain personal and private details of low-level Facebook employees and many users included in the company’s internal studies and discussions. The risks associated with releasing this information outweigh the value of the disclosure.
This review board includes Laura Edelson, PhD candidate in computer science at New York University; Damon McCoy, associate professor of computer science and engineering at NYU; Daniel Kahn Gillmor, senior technologist for the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Division; Pri Bengani, senior fellow at Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism; Ethan Zuckerman, associate professor of public policy at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst; and Michael Zimmer, associate professor of computer science at Marquette University.
This page will serve as a table of contents organizing all the documents Gizmodo has published to date, as well as a record of when we published them. We categorized the documents by subject, redacted and reviewed them multiple times, and released them in batches. Additional documents, which require further review for privacy or security reasons, will be added in the future.
Articles about the attack on the Capitol on January 6
Documents describing the task force overseeing “complex financial organizations”
Documents describing pages, posts, etc. related to elections.
Internal research related to elections
Internal proposals related to the elections
Election-related internal explainers
Election Platform and Product Updates
Various papers
Change log:
April 18, 2022: Twenty-eight documents relating to the 2020 presidential election, Donald Trump and the Jan. 6 Capitol riot have been released.
Check back for updates.
Comments are closed.