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After The US Election, Key People Are Leaving Facebook And Torching The Company In Departure Notes

A departing Facebook employee said the social network's failure to act on hate speech “makes it embarrassing to work here.”

Ryan Mac BuzzFeed News Reporter Craig Silverman BuzzFeed News Reporter

Posted on December 11, 2020, at 1:46 p.m. ET

“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 “badge post,” a traditional farewell note for any departing Facebook employee. “It also makes it embarrassing to work here.”

The departing employee declined to speak with BuzzFeed News but asked that they not be named for fear of abuse and reprisal.

While Facebook publicly claims its artificial intelligence measures catch a lot of offending content before it’s reported by users, there have been manifold examples where that system failed, leading to disastrous real-life consequences like a Facebook-organized militia event that coincided with the shooting deaths of two protestors in Kenosha, Wisconsin.

Using data from a Facebook tool called the “Hate Bait dashboard,” which can track content from groups and pages that leads to hateful interactions, the data scientist listed the 10 US pages with the “largest concentrated volume of likely violating Hate Speech comments” in the past 14 days. All were pages associated with conservative outlets or personalities, including Breitbart News, Fox News, the Daily Caller, Donald Trump’s campaign and main account, and Ben Shapiro. They also shared a sample of the hateful comments posted on a recent Breitbart News post about Nancy Pelosi’s support for transgender athletes.

We have a very good idea which actors in the US drive the largest volumes of this kind of content. In the last 14 days, the 10 pages responsible for the largest concentrated volume of likely violating Hate Speech comments have been:

Breitbart

Fox News

The Daily Caller

USA Patriots for Donald Trump

Donald Trump for President

Donald J. Trump

Ben Shapiro

Conservative Tribune by WJ

US Chronicle

The Western Journal

These pages, and a few perennial others that didn’t happen to make the top 10 in the last two weeks, but that you can find by browsing the dashboard, are filling our platform with violent and hateful content at a rate and concentration that is simply overwhelming…

The data scientist also offered parting advice to Facebook: “hire more people.” Noting that the company was able to afford it, they suggested doubling the size of employees in the integrity organization. They said it would allow the company to branch out from focusing on US and English-centric content, a concern of another former data scientist.