Whistleblower says Meta fails to address climate misinformation
Internal documents show staff disagreement over the company's handling of climate misinformation
Facebook employee-turned-whistleblower Frances Haugen has filed two new complaints with the US Security and Exchange Commission (SEC), alleging that Meta (formerly Facebook) misled investors about its efforts to combat misinformation about climate change and Covid-19 on its platform.
The documents were filed by Whistleblower Aid, the nonprofit organisation that backs Haugen, the Washington Post said on Friday.
One complaint claims that climate change misinformation was widely available on the world's largest social media platform, despite Facebook executives' commitments to combat it during earnings calls.
Haugen, through the complaint, stated that Meta did not have a clear policy on the issue as recently as last year.
The complaint also cites internal documents showing staff disagreement over Meta's handling of climate misinformation. For example, one employee in search integrity llegedly asked that the company categorise and remove more misinformation off the platform, which the company has largely tried to avoid thus far.
Last year, the Center for Countering Digital Hate found that just 10 Facebook accounts were the original source for about 70 per cent of climate denial published on the platform.
Haugen's second complaint alleged that Meta's actions did not align with its commitment to tackle Covid-19 misinformation on Facebook.
The complaint cites internal communications about the spread of vaccine hesitancy in comments, as well as internal surveys showing the dissemination of Covid-19 misinformation.
One document reportedly showed a 20 per cent spike in misinformation in April 2020, while another record from May 2020 revealed how employees noticed the presence of hundreds of anti-quarantine groups.
According to one internal survey detailed in the complaint, one out of every three US users reported seeing misleading information about both Covid-19 and voting.
Meta publicly ramped up its efforts to counter Covid-19 misinformation late last year, after accusations surfaced that it had botched its fight against anti-vaxxers.
US President Joe Biden went so far as to accuse Facebook and other social media platforms of killing people with misinformation about Covid-19 and its vaccines.
'Some investors simply will not want to invest in a company that fails to adequately address such misinformation and then engages in misstatements and omissions on the topic,' one of the complaints said, quoted in the Post.
Meta spokesperson Drew Pusateri told the Post, "there are no one-size-fits-all solutions" to prevent the spread of misinformation, and that the company was committed to building new tools and policies to combat it.
Haugen, who worked as product manager on Facebook's civic misinformation team, has provided thousands of Facebook's internal documents to lawmakers and regulators since quitting the company in May last year.
Earlier this month, she said that Facebook gives users outside the USA less protection from harmful content and does the "bare minimum" when it comes to regulating content, to save on costs.
Haugen appeared before the Australian Parliamentary Select Committee on Social Media and Online Safety and claimed the Meta-owned platform provides less help, safety and reporting of online abuse for users outside the USA. She claimed Facebook disproportionately spends its safety budget in the USA, which means users in other parts of the world miss out.
Last year, Haugen told British lawmakers that Facebook was exacerbating online hate worldwide because its algorithms are designed to promote divisive content.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has rejected all such claims, describing them as an attempt to "paint a false picture" of the company.
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