Social media giant Facebook is under public and regulatory scrutiny after the disclosure of thousands of pages of internal documents by a whistleblower who worked for the company.

What are Facebook papers?

After compiling the materials while working as a Facebook product manager, Frances Haugen distributed them to a group of 17 US news agencies who collaborated on a project to individually publish articles about their findings.

The articles, published on a coordinated day in late October, describe Facebook as seeking to grow its audience and make a profit while ignoring how people were using the platform to spread hate and disinformation.

The documents showed that Facebook was particularly struggling to monitor hate speech, inflammatory rhetoric and disinformation by users posting in certain countries, including some that Facebook had determined were most at risk of actual consequences of such abuse.

The failures included both inadequate artificial intelligence systems and not enough human moderators who speak the many languages ​​spoken by Facebook users.

Who else received them?

In addition to providing the documents to reporters, Haugen also made them available to the United States Securities and Exchange Commission and the United States Congress. Haugen also appeared before the Senate Commerce Committee and testified before the British Parliament.

Haugen used his smartphone’s camera to capture the documents.

Why are they important?

The company has massive global reach. Facebook had 2.74 billion active users at the end of September, according to company statistics. This is roughly 1 in 3 people on the planet, and the company also operates other popular services like WhatsApp and Instagram.

How did Facebook react?

Facebook spokesperson Mavis Jones said in a statement that the company is working to end abuse on its platform in places where the risk of conflict is higher and that it has native speakers. to review content in 70 languages.

Founder Mark Zuckerberg spoke on a quarterly earnings conference call on Monday and said Facebook was facing “a coordinated effort to selectively use leaked documents to paint a false picture of our business.”

Some information for this report comes from the Associated Press, Agence France-Presse and Reuters.