Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook Last month, the CEO approved a new initiative, codenamed Project Amplify. The effort, which hatched at an internal meeting in January, had a specific purpose. Use Facebook’s news feed, the site’s most important digital real estate, to tell people a positive story about social networks. According to three people who knew about this effort, pushing Facebook-backed news items (some of which were created by the company) would improve the image of the user’s eyes. However, the move was sensitive because Facebook hadn’t previously positioned the news feed as a place to hone its reputation. One attendee said some executives at the meeting were shocked by the proposal. Project Amplify has suspended a series of decisions Facebook made this year to actively reshape its image. Since its January meeting, the company has embarked on a multifaceted effort to change the story by distance. Zuckerberg From scandals, reduce outsiders’ access to internal data, fill in potentially negative reports about the content, and increase your own ads to showcase the brand. This move will lead to a major shift in strategy. For years, Facebook has faced a crisis after a crisis over privacy, misinformation, and hate speech on the platform by publicly apologizing. Zuckerberg has been personally responsible for Russia’s intervention on the site during the 2016 presidential election and has loudly endorsed freedom of speech online. Facebook also promised transparency in how it operates. However, we do not forgive the beating of criticisms of various issues such as racist speech and false information on vaccines. Dissatisfied Facebook employees are angry at leaking internal documents in opposition to their employers. Last week, The Wall Street Journal published an article based on such a document showing that Facebook knows about much of the harm it causes. As a result, Facebook executives concluded that there was little way to calm criticism or gain support, and decided to continue the attack earlier this year, six people who did not reveal their identities for fear of retaliation. Current and former employees said. “They know they won’t come to their defense, so they have to do that and say for themselves,” said Katie Harbus, a former Facebook public policy director. Said. This change involves Facebook executives from marketing, communications, policy, and integrity teams. Alex Schultz, a 14-year company veteran who was appointed Chief Marketing Officer last year, has also influenced his efforts to reshape images, five people who worked with him said. But at least one of the decisions was driven by Zuckerberg and everything was approved by him, three people said. Facebook spokesman Joe Osborne denied the company changed its approach. “People deserve to know the steps we are taking to address the various issues our company faces — and we will share those steps widely,” he said. Said in a statement. For years, Facebook executives have been plagued by the appearance of their company undergoing more scrutiny than Google and Twitter, current and former employees said. They said Facebook was apologized and noted that it provided access to internal data. As a result, executives held a virtual meeting in January to break down more aggressive defense ideas, one attendee said. The group discussed using news feeds to promote positive news about the company and to place ads linked to favorable articles about Facebook. They also discussed how to define a professional Facebook story, the two participants said. In the same month, the communications team discussed ways to weaken executive reconciliation in responding to the crisis and decided to reduce apologies, two people familiar with the plan said. Zuckerberg, who was intertwined with policy issues, including the 2020 elections, also wanted to change his position as an innovator, people said. In January, the communications team distributed a document containing strategies to keep Zuckerberg away from the scandal. This is partly due to the focus on Facebook posts and media appearances on new products.Follow this thread on OUR FORUM.

A program known as XCheck has given millions of celebrities, politicians, and other high-profile users special treatment, a privilege many abuse. Users to speak on equal footing with the elites of politics, culture and journalism, and that its standards of behavior apply to everyone, no matter their status or fame. In private, the company has built a system that has exempted high-profile users from some or all of its rules, according to company documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. The program, known as “cross check” or “XCheck,” was initially intended as a quality-control measure for actions taken against high-profile accounts, including celebrities, politicians and journalists. Today, it shields millions of VIP users from the company’s normal enforcement process, the documents show. Some users are “whitelisted”—rendered immune from enforcement actions—while others are allowed to post rule-violating material pending Facebook employee reviews that often never come. At times, the documents show, XCheck has protected public figures whose posts contain harassment or incitement to violence, violations that would typically lead to sanctions for regular users. In 2019, it allowed international soccer star Neymar to show nude photos of a woman, who had accused him of rape, to tens of millions of his fans before the content was removed by Facebook. Whitelisted accounts shared inflammatory claims that Facebook’s fact-checkers deemed false, including that vaccines are deadly, that Hillary Clinton had covered up “pedophile rings,” and that then-President Donald Trump had called all refugees seeking asylum “animals,” according to the documents. A 2019 internal review of Facebook’s whitelisting practices, marked attorney-client privileged, found favoritism to those users to be both widespread and “not publicly defensible.” “We are not actually doing what we say we do publicly,” said the confidential review. It called the company’s actions “a breach of trust” and added: “Unlike the rest of our community, these people can violate our standards without any consequences.” Despite attempts to rein it in, XCheck grew to include at least 5.8 million users in 2020, documents show. In its struggle to accurately moderate a torrent of content and avoid negative attention, Facebook created invisible elite tiers within the social network. In describing the system, Facebook has misled the public and its own Oversight Board, a body that Facebook created to ensure the accountability of the company’s enforcement systems. In June, Facebook told the Oversight Board in writing that its system for high-profile users was used in “a small number of decisions.” In a written statement, Facebook spokesman Andy Stone said criticism of XCheck was fair, but added that the system “was designed for an important reason: to create an additional step so we can accurately enforce policies on content that could require more understanding.” He said Facebook has been accurate in its communications to the board and that the company is continuing to work to phase out the practice of whitelisting. “A lot of this internal material is outdated information stitched together to create a narrative that glosses over the most important point: Facebook itself identified the issues with cross-check and has been working to address them,” he said. The documents that describe XCheck are part of an extensive array of internal Facebook communications reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. They show that Facebook knows, in acute detail, that its platforms are riddled with flaws that cause harm, often in ways only the company fully understands. Moreover, the documents show, Facebook often lacks the will or the ability to address them. This is the first in a series of articles based on those documents and on interviews with dozens of current and former employees. At least some of the documents have been turned over to the Securities and Exchange Commission and to Congress by a person seeking federal whistleblower protection, according to people familiar with the matter. Facebook’s stated ambition has long been to connect people. As it expanded over the past 17 years, from Harvard undergraduates to billions of global users, it struggled with the messy reality of bringing together disparate voices with different motivations—from people wishing each other happy birthday to Mexican drug cartels conducting business on the platform. Those problems increasingly consume the company. Time and again, the documents show, in the U.S. and overseas, Facebook’s own researchers have identified the platform’s ill effects, in areas including teen mental health, political discourse, and human trafficking. Time and again, despite congressional hearings, its own pledges, and numerous media exposés, the company didn’t fix them. Sometimes the company held back for fear of hurting its business. In other cases, Facebook made changes that backfired. Even Mr. Zuckerberg’s pet initiatives have been thwarted by his own systems and algorithms. The documents include research reports, online employee discussions, and drafts of presentations to senior management, including Mr. Zuckerberg. They aren’t the result of idle grumbling, but rather the formal work of teams whose job was to examine the social network and figure out how it could improve. They offer perhaps the clearest picture thus far of how broadly Facebook’s problems are known inside the company, up to the CEO himself. And when Facebook speaks publicly about many of these issues, to lawmakers, regulators, and, in the case of XCheck, its own Oversight Board, it often provides misleading or partial answers, masking how much it knows. Read this very detailed 2 part story on OUR FORUM.