It’s tradition for Facebook employees departing the company to write a note called a “badge post” for their colleagues. And since the U.S. election, BuzzFeed News reports that some of these notes have been highly critical of Facebook’s policies for handling hate speech, misinformation and more.
According to the report, a departing data scientist recently wrote a scathing critique of Facebook on their way out the door, using internal Facebook data to support their points. In their note, they wrote that a mind-boggling 1 of every 1,000 pieces of content shared on Facebook violates the company’s hate speech rules, but that the company deletes less than five percent of it. The employee went on to write that not only is this problem almost impossible to overcome, but that the company does a bad job of even trying in the first place.
“With so many internal forces propping up the production of hateful and violent content, the task of stopping hate and violence on Facebook starts to feel even more Sisyphean than it already is,” the employee wrote in their departing note. “It also makes it embarrassing to work here.”
For its part, Facebook disputed some of the figures that the researcher used, but the broader point still applies. If people within Facebook are this worried about how the company handles offensive content, we certainly should be, too.
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