Not stopping 'Stop the Steal:' Facebook Papers paint damning picture of company's role in insurrection
CNN
Just days after insurrectionists stormed the Capitol on January 6th, Facebook's Chief Operational Officer Sheryl Sandberg downplayed her company's role in what had happened.
"We know this was organized online. We know that," she said in an interview with Reuters. "We... took down QAnon, Proud Boys, Stop the Steal, anything that was talking about possible violence last week. Our enforcement's never perfect so I'm sure there were still things on Facebook. I think these events were largely organized on platforms that don't have our abilities to stop hate and don't have our standards and don't have our transparency."
But internal Facebook (FB) documents reviewed by CNN suggest otherwise. The documents, including an internal post-mortem and one document showing in real time countermeasures Facebook employees were belatedly implementing, paint a picture of a company that was in fact fundamentally unprepared for how the Stop the Steal movement used its platform to organize, and that only truly swung into action after the movement had turned violent.
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