 The Facebook Files. Last year, a Harvard graduate and Facebook employee, Francis Horvig, had handled a huge trove of internal Facebook documents to, among others, newspapers, journalists and, in fact, the U.S. Senate where she came to testify about Facebook's conduct. This has gained quite some attention, but at least in Germany, perhaps not as much as it should have. And I'm welcoming today Lina, who will be giving a better insight into the Facebook Files and what it is all about. We will be having a 30-minute talk roughly and about a quarter of an hour Q&A after that. So please do contribute with your questions on the various channels. They will hopefully miraculously appear on my screen to be transferred over the air to our nice ladies who will be giving us many insights. The screen is yours for everyone. Okay, 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. Really, Congress, no, just a 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 an in-depth and exclusive view and insight, let us shortly introduce us. So, yeah, Lina, you go first. Hi, I'm Lina. I'm an investigative reporter with WDR in the Dutch Insider in Berlin. And I also work on terror investigations, but also anything complex. So I, of course, jumped on the Facebook Files as well. Yes. And my name is Svea. I also am an investigative reporter working freelance for NDR television, mostly in tech issues. And Lina and I, we worked very closely together for several weeks or month now on the Facebook Files. We were in the team where had the contact to Francis Hogan first in 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 Francis Hogan 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 we'll vanish behind it. So, yeah, have a great time and Lina will start first. Okay, let's see. This is who we are. We just told you and then let's go, Lina. And I can't see the presentation. Okay, sorry. Then let's just make sure that yes. Yes, sorry. Okay. No, this should work. Who is Francis Hogan? Okay, Lina, you go first. So who is Francis Hogan? Well, 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's 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 Francis in video calls. She appeared on the screen as a very normal woman our age with headphones and on her couch. And until October, in the beginning of October, we knew her under a code name. So until she really revealed her identity, she was also using a code name with other journalists. And yeah, we learned that she was 37 years old. She was born in Iowa. Both her parents were professors, but her mother later became a priest. And Francis 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 first at Google, mainly working on Google Books. Then she got a job at the help 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 reputation for being an engine of medicalization. And because of the personal experience Francis had and led to her first. This is a clip from our interview with her. Yeah, let's try. Right. Why do you do what you do? So I came into Facebook. When I started on Facebook, I had a strong friendship over the platform. Finally, I had a friend who had radicalized with help from the Internet in 2016. And I thought very quickly, oh my God, the problem is even much bigger than I thought. So much larger than even I thought it was. So as we heard, when she arrived at Facebook, the disenchantment or the problems she saw started immediately. Because immediately she saw that what she had thought of Facebook as an engine of medicalization was even bigger. And with her personal experience, just to explain that, 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 on normal social media sites and ended at Fort Chan and led him through the universe of conspiracy myths. She told us that she was shocked that she lost him, 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, the job at the integrity team, the team at Facebook that was formed to protect the US election and working on civic integrity, she really thought that she could make a change. But she realized that the company, she said, didn't want to change. Although she really admired her coworkers, she said they were really smart and credit 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 appearance are professors and it feels very natural to her to sit and explain things to people. And that's what she does now, as we'll see later. She's really touring the world to get her message out. And also we learned 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 a whistleblower almost as drawn. But let's go to her motivations, why in the end she wanted to become a whistleblower. So these are two clips from our interview again. And she told us that when she was at Facebook, I was faced with information that I believe put maybe a million or 10 million lines on the line. I sat there and if 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 save even a fraction of those lives, she has to do something. And 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 wrong, they are skewed. And then also she says that she fails to change the system from within. And she realized this problem so much larger than even I thought it was. I kept trying and trying at some point and read the realization that there was enough systematic problems that I would have at some point figure out how to bring the information to the public. So she tried actually to make her complaints heard in the company, but she had the, she was under the impression that the leadership didn't want to listen. Yeah. And I think with this things you have now learned about Francis Haugen, I think if you know all these things, you can understand the league 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 was a 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. He also got the chance to meet Francis Haugen and probably in the podcast from What's Rejournal. He tells the story that they were talking to each other and yeah, probably this also 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. Maybe she started earlier, but this is something 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 What's Rejournal stories 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 is 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 SEC and to US Congress via whistleblower aid. We will talk about this later too. And then things get rushed and then things get IQ each or then the everything gets very fast. So there you have the filing and 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 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 from the EU consortium. So we thought maybe what's probably most interesting for you here guys is not the question what's in the files. Maybe we'll tell about this later too but 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 are speaking about the Facebook files and as Lena already mentioned Frances Haugen was a data scientist within Facebook. She worked with the civic integrity team and later she worked with counterespionage. So she was a regular Facebook employee. She hadn't had 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 have in Facebook you have some kind of internal Facebook which is called a workplace and in workplace you find a vast, vast amount of internal research reports and people are discussing this research with each other but must admit so in this research there you have a lot of technical terms and you have a lot of teams speaking to each other and the research is made for Facebook employees so of course it's full of abbreviations or 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 the file what did we see when we dived into it? So you have these totally unstructured PDF documents with more than estimated 10,000 pages they are 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 and you have comments you have smileys and then you have these black reductions which were made later on because all these files were made for congress and so all the names were redacted and 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 Francis Haugen she was not 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 about the internal Facebook where leadership is discussing something so you get an idea or a glimpse what the board thought or what high rank executive thoughts but this is basically something what the files are not telling then Facebook files don't provide any context and this is something what also Francis Haugen thinks what really is the reason why she gave to journalists because she hoped that we could provide context because there are no information on who did the report so usually the author is redacted so you can't see is he a good researcher is he long working with Facebook or what has he got for an education so you don't know how reliable they are or what happened before the study or after so 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 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 it's not representative and so this is very important if you look at the files that you look on the numbers how many people with how many people a study has conducted or with how many accounts or how many what is it really about and then you also see in the file specific areas which are very well represented like hate speech I think this is an issue Francis Haugen worked a lot on it and the civic integrity teams and 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 swifting through the files and what is what research is there on fake accounts some research of course but yeah I was I was missing I was missing content and I thought they 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 firms then engagement numbers there are some engagement numbers but not that much so I can only speculate about why there are some areas very well represented in the files and some aren't but I think probably there are different reasons so on the one hand Francis Haugen she had a specific time a 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 this are internal research this is internal research these are internal studies so there are only studies where Facebook employees thought this is some kind we definitely should investigate and if there is no if they didn't fear the urge to investigate it of course there can't be a file so these are some reasons I think why some areas are missing okay so now 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 the young boomer man he did again talking about this 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 first revelations so let's talk about growth this was something I was looking into it 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 into the files then you can see that young users and especially users under the age of 25 that the numbers are decreasing and this is what you can see here pretty closely you have the red line and then you have the blue line symbolizing the younger users under 25 and even in Covid times where you have on the right corner you see this spike in all the other age groups especially I think people above 50 got highly interested in Facebook during Covid now just joking so you have every age group is using Facebook more during Covid but not so the people under 25 and this is pretty interesting because of the filing for the SAC, the Börsenaufsicht and 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 there the polarization goes on and that Facebook is not taking enough measures especially for sub languages 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 is this one so sorry I think you can't read a lot but I will explain is this report it's called the OPEX report and it's really a long document with a lot of numbers but I liked it very much because there were so many numbers in it the document and not only a study one researcher did and in this OPEX report you can see the misproportion in spending money to fight misinformation between English speaking countries like the US and ROW this is rest of world so you see here on the document on the right 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 transferred into man-hours that 84% man-hours here is the first quarter quarter of 2020 that 84% was spent for misinformation and rest of world is 16% which if you compare the US to the rest of the world you can definitely see where the focus where Facebook focus lies and this also was one document Francis Hogan pointed us through and said you have to check the numbers and then you can see what I mean when I say they are profit and growth is more important for Facebook than human lives so I hope this very yeah this document makes this clear okay yeah what does Facebook say Facebook says no we're doing a lot of course and everything people using Facebook this is really important to us okay and now for the last part I give yeah Lina will tell you something more about the fight with them yeah thank you very much so what is really interesting to us is to see the discussion in the work culture the discussions amongst teams and amongst 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 amongst employees because as we have counted there were at least 11 major leagues since 2016 most of the leakers remained anonymous but there were also some that have been that went public for example Sophie Zhang went public in April 2021 and there was just a few months before Francis Houghton came out and became public and she had leaked a document so Zhang had not leaked any documents but she had talked to reporters and when she ended her appointment with Facebook she said she posted a batch post this is kind of part of the internal exchanges and we found many of these batch posts she posted I found multiple blatant attempts by foreign national governments to abuse our platform on vast scales to mislead their own citizenry and cause international use on multiple occasions and just as Francis Houghton was concerned with with Facebook lack of content moderation and lack of enforcement of community standards outside of the US so this just to show you that internal debate was very public internally so I mean we found another batch post it was called Leaving Q&A this was from May 2021 and there this person was concerned about hate speech and this person said she couldn't take it anymore to be an Facebook employee because she said with so many internal forces propping up the production of hateful and violent content the test of stopping hate and violence on Facebook starts to feel even more Sisyphean than it already is and she means internal forces meaning the leadership this is something that or this person says so many internal forces the leadership this is something that Francis Houghton was also really concerned about on the one hand there are people working on combating hate speech and changing the algorithms to make it a better and safer environment and then on the other hand there are some forces 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 6th after the storm on the Capitol and and their employees were very much discussing and they were very, they were furious and one person said we've been fueling this fire for a long time and we shouldn't be surprised it's now out of control so employees are giving Facebook responsibility for the development and another person said employees are tired of thoughts and prayers from leadership we want action and another person says so many research back 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 Francis Houghton and she says in our interview she says there are solutions there are there are wonderful employees and wonderful teams who are working to come up with solutions but they are they are blocked by leadership out of a for profit interest and this is here a screenshot of another person saying I'm struggling to match my values to my employment here I came here hoping to affect change and improve society but I've seen this atrophy and abdication of responsibility I'm tired of attitudes I want action items not a neutral entity so employees seem to be extremely critical of Facebook yeah 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's reaction to the Facebook files and the revelation that came out after October 4th after Haugen went public Mark Zuckerberg said in a message to his employees he said we care deeply about issues like safety, well-being and mental health and the coverage misrepresents our work and our motives and Facebook's communication John Pinetti said even that it was an orchestrated campaign against Facebook and in response to our reporting he said we welcome scrutiny and feedback but these documents are being used to find a narrative that we hide that we hide or cherry pick data when in fact we do the opposite they are kind of blankly refusing Francis Haugen's accusations but let's see what happened to Francis Haugen during this process she was talking to a reporter early on and she was on her own but when she started when the revelation started the Wall Street Journal apparently we don't know could you you know I'm hearing the sound from the sea base 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 Tai and a profit legal 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 at the Libby New Formacy of Open Technology Fund so they helped Francis making protected disclosures and she also had lawyers who represent her they are from Bryce and Gillette a consulting firm founded in 2020 by Bill Burton he was a former deputy spokesman of Obama and Bryce and Gillette 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 Democratic political campaign we think that but let's go on there are more groups involved with Francis just to wrap it up there is also a Luminat Group which is founded by Pierre Omidia the founder of eBay and also Ben Scott is involved there he is a former policy advisor for innovation at the U.S. Department of State and Hillary Clinton was there and they are operating closely on funding for example reset tech operating also in the U.S. and Europe the nonprofit lobbying organization that wants to regulate the market for big tech so these organizations they come from the Democratic spectrum there is no question but we think and our impression was that they were matching Francis Hargan's interests in the same goals so they came together in the process really important to see now okay what's next so we have reported on the Facebook files in Europe in the U.S. but it's pretty exciting to see 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 of glimpse what happened after 7th of October so then yeah Francis Hargan went on some kind of tour through Europe so she was in London she was in Lisbon and in November she went to Berlin to Brussels and to Paris so why did she do that why did she travel from 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 rock star or something why did she do this yeah it is because she clearly has some kind of agenda she definitely wants something to change and she did not want to throw a lot of documents in the internet and then hide in a castle or somewhere else she definitely wanted something yeah she wanted action so she had big hopes in Europe because as probably some of you know here the Digital Services Act is debated was debated in the parliament and now it is up to the commission so hopefully next year the Digital Services Act will be in place and yeah she and also many groups are hoping for more regulations and control regarding especially content moderation fines 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 they hope that SEC will have a million or billion dollar fine on Facebook and also probably pushes for more regulation and the discussions are just around that users getting more control of their data that there is more transparency and probably that also there is more taxation probably on digital ads just to make the business model harder because I think also this is only one way to come by is to do something on the business model okay yeah we hope you enjoyed our presentation and we want to thank you for listening and also big thanks to the team who worked with that and I hope we have another 5 to 10 minutes for some Q&A yes thank you yes we have indeed another 10 minutes before we have to prepare for the next talk thank you very much for these 45 minutes of content very well 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 that 85% of all the content comes from payments for the ugly content and not for the good one how true is this how evil is Facebook compared to other debated evil doers like telegram or others what do you think I think that the Facebook files you have like the feeling that you are in a submarine and you're diving into the marine and you're diving on the other water and then you go with the light bulb you know with one light and then you shed into the dark and these are the Facebook files and you can't see what surrounds this so I think we definitely so I think it's not fair to say like the whole company is so or so it's only fair to say that in these what you can see on the comments for example after the storm and the capital 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 are called it's quite a very unique player on the market they are 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 I hope I could it's a little bit of philosophical question so I hope my answer is okay I mean I want to add I think it's true we are only seeing a glimpse of of course of the internal discussion but it gives us an impression and I think the impression I would see is right that there is a lot of frustration amongst employees because what Facebook says on the outside like we are good we are connecting with people whatever their slogan is it seems to be not confirmed by many employees they think just as Fentish Haugen thinks that the company is putting profit over safety and they are probably a lot of employees that are super happy to work at Facebook and they don't see it they have amazing perks that they get at the office they have little kitchens it seems to be a wonderful place to work at but if you care about these issues it seems that many or many people who really care about these issues such as hate speech such as democratic policies such as foreign influence on elections they seem to be very frustrated so as I said I expect more whistleblowers I expect more leaks to come and also it's a structural thing it's a structural thing when you compare it for example to Twitter it seems to be that Twitter is doing many things much better than Facebook but as again as you can't really compare it but there is a discussion within the Facebook about a firewall between those parts of the company that are enforcing internal policies and those parts of the company who are responsible for the numbers and who are selling ads for example and apparently at Twitter there is a firewall but at Facebook there is no firewall so the same people who are selling ads are also making exceptions for political actors on certain behaviors and this is a structural thing that frustrates many people no Chinese wall I see I'm getting signals that we have only three minutes left a very short question and a very 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 levels access controls, encryptions rights management work on this platform is anything in the leaks about that no only research reports only vast amount of research reports but this vast amount seem to be accessible okay somebody is waving waving us goodbye I see thank you so much interesting insights, interesting updates folks follow this issue it's not over, things will be coming thank you Lina thank you Sviya I wish you good health through the winter and thank you again for your marital effort here thank you bye everything is licensed under CC by 4.0 and it is all for the community to download for every bot