B efore I tell you what happened at exactly p. At p. Hang Mike Pence! The spectacle excited him. Which brings us to p. David A. Graham: This is a coup. They were angry, and they were very specifically angry at Facebook.
Their message was clear: This is our fault. At this point, faith alone is not sufficient. Facebook employees have long understood that their company undermines democratic norms and restraints in America and across the globe. The Atlantic reviewed thousands of pages of documents from Facebook, including internal conversations and research conducted by the company, from to Frances Haugen, the whistleblower and former Facebook engineer who testified before Congress earlier this month, filed a series of disclosures about Facebook to the Securities and Exchange Commission and to Congress before her testimony.
Redacted versions of those documents were obtained by a consortium of more than a dozen news organizations, including The Atlantic. The names of Facebook employees are mostly blacked out. The documents are astonishing for two reasons: First, because their sheer volume is unbelievable. Authoritarianism predates the rise of Facebook, of course. But Facebook makes it much easier for authoritarians to win. Again and again, the Facebook Papers show staffers sounding alarms about the dangers posed by the platformβhow Facebook amplifies extremism and misinformation, how it incites violence, how it encourages radicalization and political polarization.
By nightfall on January 6, , the siege had been reversed, though not without fatalities. The staffer then turned, just as others had, to the years of failures and inaction that had preceded that day.
Rank and file workers have done their part to identify changes to improve our platform but have been actively held back. Can you offer any reason we can expect this to change in the future. It was a question without a question mark. But for some Facebook employees, the decision to crack down on Trump for inciting violence was comically overdue. Facebook had finally acted, but to many at the company, it was too little, too late.
