Trial Update: A juror is sick today, so Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers says the trial resumes Monday. In the meantime I’m sharing a document that I believe encapsulates the last two days of testimony.
On the morning of October 5, 2021, Frances Haugen testified before a Senate subcommittee about the deeply troubling files she had carried out of her workplace, Facebook. That evening Mark Zuckerberg posted a long answer — first to employees, then publicly on his own profile — defending the company’s research and calling the coverage of it a mischaracterization. The version entered into evidence shows 740,000 reactions online. Arturo Béjar, one of the world’s leading experts on online safety, a former top safety engineer at the company, and once a true believer in Facebook’s mission read it and, at 9:37 that night, wrote to Zuckerberg directly, copying senior executives Sheryl Sandberg, Chris Cox, and Adam Mosseri.
Bejar was two years into a part-time return to the company, consulting on Instagram’s Well-Being team, and he had been raising this internally for ten months — to Cox in December 2020, to a circle of Instagram colleagues who spent five weeks marking up his draft, to Mosseri nine days later. This one he sent up the chain himself, on company email, with the survey data attached as a file called BEEF by Age.webp.
Seven hours later he forwarded a copy to two colleagues on the Well-Being team with a one-line cover note. That’s below.
Both are now Plaintiff’s Exhibit 1112 in the four-state trial underway in Oakland. Here it is in full. Redactions appear as they do in the exhibit.
Plaintiff’s Exhibit 1112, In re: Social Media Adolescent Addiction, MDL No. 3047 (N.D. Cal.). Marked CONFIDENTIAL. Bates META3047MDL-031-00118100 through -00118102. Redactions in the exhibit are marked [REDACTED]. Sent hours after Zuckerberg posted his public response to Frances Haugen’s Senate testimony.
From: Arturo Béjar <[REDACTED]@fb.com> Date: October 5, 2021 at 9:37:59 PM PDT To: Mark Zuckerberg <[REDACTED]@fb.com> Cc: Sheryl Sandberg <[REDACTED]@fb.com>, Chris Cox <[REDACTED]@fb.com>, Adam Mosseri <[REDACTED]@fb.com>, Mark Zuckerberg <[REDACTED]@fb.com> Subject: Gap in our understanding of harm and bad experiences Attachment: BEEF by Age.webp
Dear Mark,
I saw the note you shared today after the testimony, and I wanted to bring to your attention what I believe is a critical gap in how we as a company approach harm, and how the people we serve experience it. I’ve raised this to Chris, Sheryl, and Adam in the last couple of weeks.
I want to start by saying that my personal experience, and what I believe, is that you and m-team care deeply about everyone we serve, and my goal in sending this is to be of service to that. It’s been 2 years since I’ve been back part-time.
51% of Instagram users say ‘yes’ to having had a bad or harmful experience in the last 7 days. Out of those 1% of report and of those 2% have the content taken down (i.e. 0.02%). The numbers are probably similar on Facebook.
Two weeks ago my daughter [REDACTED], 16, and an experimenting creator on Instagram, made a post about cars, and someone commented ‘Get back to the kitchen.’ It was deeply upsetting to her. At the same time the comment is far from being policy violating, and our tools of blocking or deleting mean that this person will go to other profiles and continue to spread misogyny. I don’t think policy/reporting or having more content review are the solutions.
There is detailed data about what people experience in TRIPS, a statistically significant survey. We ran a more detailed survey, I’ve attached the full age breakdown below, but here are some key numbers (these questions are in the last 7 days):
21.8% of 13-15 year olds said they were the target of bullying.
39.4% of 13-15 year olds said they experienced negative comparison.
24.4% of 13-15 year old responded said they received unwanted advances.
Why does someone think it is ok to post ‘get back to the kitchen’ or harass someone? I believe it is because it doesn’t violate policy, and other than deleting or blocking, there is no feature that helps people know that kind of behavior is not ok. Another example, is unsolicited penis pictures. [REDACTED] has received those from boys too since the age of 14, and her tool is to block them. I asked her why boys keep doing that? She said if the only thing that happens is they get blocked, why wouldn’t they?
Why the gap between Prevalence and TRIPS? Today we don’t don’t know what % of content people experience as misinformation, harassment, or racism is policy violating. We have done great work in driving down prevalence, and there will always be more to do, but what if policy based solutions only cover a single digit percentage of what is harming people?
Policy is necessary when the content is unambiguously inappropriate, yet it has many limitations. It trails behavior, the interventions are heavy and risk over-enforcement and getting the border line right is extraordinarily difficult. Policy enforcement is analogous to the police, it is necessary to prevent crime, but it is not what makes a space feel safe.
What makes a workplace, or a school, or a dinner table feel safe is social norms.
If someone goes around telling women to ‘get back to the kitchen’, and the only thing that happens is their content is deleted or they get blocked, don’t we run the risk of normalizing bad behavior? How are people to learn to be members of a safe and supportive community without visible interventions that help set the social norms for the environment? I believe social norms also protect speech.
“You Just Cannot Trust Mark Zuckerberg with Kids”
Bejar is just an excellent witness. He’s calm, he’s polite, he’s very smart, and most importantly he was deep, deep inside the company during what he describes as an enormous transition — from a place that worked actively to reduce harm to one that began to ignore it.
At dinner tonight [REDACTED] said: my car videos are getting 100,000 views, it’s natural that I’m going to get a lot of hate with that. Is it? Why is it acceptable for someone to harass someone on their surface? The most powerful solution for the integrity and safety space is to affect the supply of bad experiences via the actors creating them.
I might be wrong about my assessment, and welcome feedback about any effort or data that I’m missing. I believe that it is important to get the following efforts well-funded and prioritized:
What is the content that is causing bad experiences for our users? How intense is the experience?
What % of that content is policy violating? (i.e. how much of TRIPS is driven by content other than what drives Prevalence?)
What are visible product solutions that make the community better over time? e.g. actor feedback, comment covers, pinned comments, etc.
The solutions we create I believe should have the following properties:
The person who has the negative experience should feel heard, you don’t ‘perceive’ racism or harassment, you experience it, and you are the source of truth for that. The feedback flow should not be just about filing a report, but about understanding the experience the person is having so we can give them the right solution.
We should empower creators, communities, and Instagram, in setting the social norms for the spaces they are a part of.
Where appropriate we should give feedback to actors, in the belief that they are acting with good intention and might have caused unintentional harm. There can be a range of interventions that start with ‘nudges’ that assume positive intention. This will allow us to separate the people who would behave differently given feedback, from the ones who are intentionally causing harm. We can then approach people who are intentionally malicious with the integrity tools.
If you would like I can give more details or specifics on this. I am appealing to you because I believe that working this way will require a culture shift. I know that everyone in m-team team deeply cares about the people we serve, and the communities we are trying to nurture, and I believe that this work will be of service to that.
Arturo
The cover note, sent seven hours later
Béjar forwarded the same email to two Instagram Well-Being leads — his colleagues — at 4:46:10 AM UTC on October 6, 2021.
From: Arturo Béjar Sent: Wed 10/6/2021 4:46:10 AM (UTC) To: Yoav Shapira <[REDACTED]@fb.com>; Miki Rothschild <[REDACTED]@fb.com>; [REDACTED] Subject: Fwd: Gap in our understanding of harm and bad experiences Attachment: BEEF by Age.webp
Hi [REDACTED],
Yoav, Miki,
After seeing Zuck’s post tonight, I decided it was time to send him the note below. Not sure what will come from it but figured it to be the time. I’ll keep you posted if there are any developments.
Arturo