In the fall of 2021, members of the U.S. Congress and hundreds of Western journalists obtained access to a collection of internal Facebook documents. The trove of research reports, proposals, presentations, and employee conversations would form the foundation for dozens of news stories describing Facebook’s own awareness of the real-world harms that resulted from its relentless pursuit of its users’ attention.
Whistleblower Frances Haugen—a former member of the Civic Integrity team at the company now called Meta—shared the cache of more than 1,300 documents that would come to be known collectively as the Facebook Papers. She would go on to testify before Congress as to their implications. Lawmakers would grill Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri about them as well.
In November 2021, Gizmodo partnered with a group of independent experts to review, redact, and publish the Facebook Papers. This committee serves to advise and monitor our work and facilitate the responsible disclosure of the greatest number of documents in the public interest possible. We believe in the value of open access to these materials. Our collective goal is to minimize any potential harms that could result from the disclosure of certain methods by which Meta tackles sensitive issues like sex trafficking, disinformation, and voter manipulation. The documents, which have not previously been published, additionally contain both personal and private details about low-level Facebook employees and many of the users included in the company’s studies and internal discussions. The risks associated with publishing this information outweighs the value of disclosure.
That review committee includes Laura Edelson, PhD candidate in computer science at New York University; Damon McCoy, associate professor in computer science and engineering at NYU; Daniel Kahn Gillmor, a senior staff technologist with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology division; Pri Bengani, senior research fellow at Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism; Ethan Zuckerman, associate professor of public policy at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst; and Michael Zimmer, associate professor in computer science at Marquette University.
This page will serve as a table of contents organizing every document Gizmodo has published to date along with a record of when we published them. We have categorized the documents by topic, redacted and reviewed them multiple times, and released them in batches. Additional documents, which require greater scrutiny for privacy or security reasons, will be added in the future.
Election 2020 Documents
Papers About the Jan. 6 Capitol Attack
- Mission Control Post Jan 6th IPOC
- CTO Mike Schroepfer’s Jan 6th post
- Jan 6th Freedom of Expression Survey
- Facebook Insurrection Redacted for Congress enclosures (Part 1)
- Facebook Insurrection Redacted for Congress enclosures (Part 2)
- Employee Post: Rhetoric of Violence
Papers Describing the Election-Related Task Force Monitoring “Complex Financial Organizations”
Papers Describing Election-Related Pages, Posts, Etc.
- User Engagement on Civic Content
- Where do top civic pages get their audiences from
- Understanding the Impact of Political Content on Facebook Experience and Sentiment
- Political Content on Facebook (Part 1) Understanding Consumer Experiences and how Facebook Can help
Internal Election-Related Research
- User Perspectives on Facebook’s Voter and Census Disenfranchisement Policy
- Adding civic users to XCheck (Cross Check)
Internal Election-Related Proposals
- May 2020-Alternative Responses
- Workstream 3: Alternative Responses
- Civic Disenfranchise - Interference, Demobilization, Interference
- Sociographic Segments may be impactful for hate speech and voter suppression
Internal Election-Related Explainers
Election-Related Platform and Product Updates
- 2020 Election Integrity Lockdown
- SEV Civic Non-Recommendable Groups
- Write Up On Civic Non-Recommendable Groups SEV
- 2020 Crisis Pillar Detection Product Lookback
- Civic Targeted Risk Scores
- Top-N Integrity
Miscellaneous Papers
- Update on political publishers
- Proposal to reset White House Instagram over hostile followers
- Groups before election
- Elections Workshop Agenda 2019
- Sociographic Segments May be Impactful for Both Hate Speech and Voter Suppression
Ranking Documents
Ranking-Related Explainers
Ranking-Related Platform and Product Updates
Ranking-Related Proposals
- Distributive Justice at Facebook
- Providing Negative Feedback Should Be Easy (And Why This Would Be Game Changing For Integrity)
Papers Discussing “Demotions” in Feeds
- Has Disaster Been Averted?
- Demotions from Community Review Are Low Accuracy in Prevalence
- This Note May Not Reach Many People: Driving Demotions Transparency Through Product Interventions
- Demotions Transparency Does Not A Priori Increase Legitimacy
- Policy Input on ARC (At-Risk Country) Demotions
- Issues with Restrictions/Demotions on Palestinian Content
- What Does It Mean to Have a Voice?
- Demoting Troll-Like Comments
- Integrity Tradeoffs
- DMARS H2 Plan (WIP)
- [LAUNCH] Replacing Downstream Impact for Civic and Health
- Project Brief: Reduce Audit V2
- Downside Metrics: Viewer-Side Collateral Damage Measures
- Demotion Strategies for High-Quality Integrity Signals\
Papers Discussing “Meaningful Social Interactions” (MSI)
- MSI Metric Note Series
- The Meaningful Social Interactions Metric Revisited: Part 2
- The Meaningful Social Interactions Metric Revisited: Part 4
- The Meaningful Social Interactions Metric Revisited: Part 5
- Meaningful Social Interactions Useful Links
- MSI Documentation
- Evaluating MSI Metric Changes with a Comment-Level Survey
- Surveying The 2018 Relevance Ranking Holdout
- Overview of MSI + Pages and Survey Research
- Is Multi-Group Picker “Spammy?”
- Filtering Out Engagement-Bait, Bullying, and Excessive Comments From MSI Deltoid Metric
- [LAUNCH] Using p(anger) to Reduce the Impact Angry Reactions Have on Ranking Levers
- Planned MSI Metric Changes in 2020
- MSI Metric Changes for 2020 H1
- Should We Reduce the MSI Weight of Sticker Comments?
- Max Reshare Depth Experiment
Miscellaneous Papers
News Feed Documents
- The Surprising Consequences to Sessions and MSI Caused by Turning Off Video Autoplay on News Feed
- One-Go Summary Post for Recent Goaling and Goal Metric Changes for News Feed
- News Feed UXR Quarterly Insights Roundup
- What Happens If We Delete Ranked Feed?
- News Feed Research: Looking Back on H2 2020
- Content from “Political” Pages in In-Feed Recommendations
- Political Content in In-Feed Recommendations (IFR)
- In-Feed Recommendations HPM —April 15 2021
- News Recommendations Pillar
- Showing More Informative Links in News Feed
- Goal Report, April 30
- Distribution and Personalization, 05/07
- Integrity Audit-Context, Update, and Next Steps
- Connection Integrity: Feed and Stories Distribution
- How Much of News Feed is Good (or Bad) For The World?
- Is News Feed Becoming More or Less Valuable to People?
- News Feed Relevance FYI
- Political Party Response to ‘18 Algorithmic Change
- Feed Composition and Integrity
- H1 Progress and Roadmap Highlights
- Feed Recommendations Working Group
Climate Change Documents
- FCU Feedback & XFN (FIT, UIP, Content Understanding)
- Climate Change Integrity Discussion: Climate Change Misinformation
- Climate Change Integrity Discussion
- Policy For Misinformation—Climate Change Denial?
- Q1 Update on Our Climate Efforts
- Workers Speaking Critically of Facebook’s Efforts at Sustainability and Combating Climate Misinformation
- Examples of Climate Change Misinformation Appearing on Facebook Watch
- Video Search Feedback: Climate Videos
- International Climate Change Interviews Kicking Off Friday in Texas and Monday in Oklahoma
- Driving Positive Impact With CSIC: Opportunity Areas Based on Climate Change Understanding
- Search Integrity—Climate Change Escalation
- Climate Science Information Center is Open for Dogfooding!
- Starting the Climate Team
- The Effect on Communities By Global Heating
- This Week I Learned: Young Adults Care Deeply About Climate Change!
- Overhead@FB
Covid-19 Documents
- Vaccine Hesitancy in Comments: C19D Lockdown Update
- Identifying and Comparing Pro- and Anti-COVID-19 Vaccine Comments
- Vaccine Hesitancy Is Twice as Prevalent in English Vaccine Comments Compared to English Vaccine Posts
- COVID Containment Week 2: Ideas Pipeline: Global Health Commons
- “Harmful Non-Violating Narratives” Is a Problem Archetype In Need of Novel Solutions
- Potential Vaccine Hesitancy Product Solutions
- XFN Covid Recommendations
- A Covid Multi-Language Facebook Post Classifier
- Connection Integrity Covid-19 Task Force
- COVID-19 Vaccine Offense HPM 3/10
- Revamping the Antivax Searchability Query Set with the Signal-Based Method
- Health Integrity Feedback Example
- COVID-19 Vaccine Risks Appear to be Concentrated Among a Few Subpopulation Segments
- Integrity: Links, Research, and Discussion, 1
- Integrity: Links, Research, and Discussion, 2
- Facebook Creating a Big Echo Chamber—Do We Care?
- Ghost Posts—“Remdesiver is a Cure”
- COVID Misinfo Discussion
Teens and Kids Documents
- The “Downward Spiral” - Instagram Causes Eating Disorders
- Cultural Norms - What Teens Do and Say On Instagram
- Teens Aren’t Adopting Facebook
- Prioritizing Children - the Kids, Tweens, and Teens Taskforce
- Eating Disorders Are a “Relevant and Important Topic”
- Facebook Tries to Understand “Finstas”
- We Need To Do Better At Targeting Teens
- Kids Sure Are Talking a Lot About Mental Health
- Teen Analytics - How Are Teens Doing On IG?
- Teen Engagement Decline Update
- Our “Foundational Research” On Teen’s Overall Well-Being On IG
- Why Kids Make So Many Different Accounts
- How Often Kids See Other Kids Online
- Quality Time - Parents, Kids, and the Fight Against Screen Time
- “The Power of Identities: Why Teens And Young Adults Choose Instagram”
- The Differences Between the Content Recommended to Teens Versus Adults
Content Enforcement Docs
Documents Mapping out Intensity of User Experiences to Certain Violating Content
Content Appeal Rates by Country and Types of Appeals
- Appeal Rate by Country
- Users Perceptions of Over Enforcement
- Relevance’s Voice of The Community Report
- ‘Everyone Has a Nipple’: Reactions To Post Removals
- Group Levels Takedowns Organized by Age
- Content Entity Enforcement For Content Problems
- Appeal Rates Per Country
- Perceptions of Over Enforcement
Strike Thresholds for Various Harmful Content
- Discussion of Strike Thresholds for Global Terrorist Organizations
- Discussion of ‘Soft Actions’ And Mark Zuckerberg’s Feedback
- Adding Strikes Policy For Violent=Non-State Actors And Criminal Organizations
- Data on Increased Strikes and Takedowns
Research Discussing ‘Soft Actions” to Address Violating Content
Civic Integrity Docs
- Perceptions of Hate Speech Are Much Larger On Facebook Than Other Apps
- Plans To Increase Facebook Defenses of Non-Violating Harms
- Integrity Review Value Measurement
- Experiments For Increasing Integrity Metrics
- Deep Dive On Minimal Integrity Holdout
- Integrity Choices And Like Data
- Maximum Integrity Holdout
- Auditing Integrity Systems To Make Sure We Don’t Hurt Racial Justice
Polarization Documents
- Demystifying Polarization Metrics
- Societal Violence Discussions
- A Starting Point For Understanding Polarization on Facebook
- How Information Corridors Work
- Polarization Measurements on Facebook
- External Research on Polarization
- Polarization of Users Reading High-Quality and Low-Quality News
- Internal Polarization Measurement Survey
- Drebbel: System Intended to Measure Possibility of Digital Rabbitholes
- Use of Love and Angry Emojis to Political Posts
- Depreciating Sparing Sharing
Ads Documents
- “We need to talk about Breitbart (Again)”
- The Pre-Harm “Banhammer”
- Political Ads For Donations Case Study
Hate Speech Documents
- Notes From A Meeting About Borderline Hostile Speech
- The Harassment/Silencing Tradeoff
- Testing Comment Management Tools
- Violating Hostile Content Q1 2021 Update
- The Network Effects Of Disrupting Hate Speech Enforcement
- Why People Don’t Talk About Politics On Facebook
- Civic Harassment Research for Q3 2019
- Short Term Hate Reduction Plan
- Improving Civic Conversations With Conversational Motifs
- Investments Across At Risk Communities
Changelog:
May 19, 2022: Added two civic integrity documents, 10 hate speech documents, three documents about ads, and one document about polarization.
May 2, 2022: 37 documents relating to the Facebook’s ranking practices were published.
April 18, 2022: 28 documents relating to the 2020 presidential election, Donald Trump, and the Jan. 6 Capitol riot were published.
October 18, 2022: Two documents related to the 2020 elections, two documents related to rankings, 14 documents related to the News Feed, and 16 documents related to climate change were published.
January 12, 2023: Added 18 documents related to Covid-19 policies and Covid-19 misinformation.
February 14, 2023: Added 16 documents related to Kids’ and Teens’ engagement on Facebook and Instagram, and how the apps affect them.
February 27, 2023: Added 12 documents related to content takedowns, user attitudes to enforcement, and Facebook’s strikes policy.
April 6, 2023: Added three documents related to content enforcement and five documents related to civil integrity rules.
June 15, 2023: Added 11 documents related to political polarization.
Check back for updates.