Nick Clegg refutes anticipated whistleblower claim that Facebook contributed to Capitol attack
Former UK deputy prime minister Nick Clegg has written a 1500 word internal memo to Facebook’s staff readying them for an expected whistleblower claim that the company contributed to the January 6 Capitol riot in Washington DC, denouncing it as “misleading”.
Clegg, who now heads up the social media giant as its vice-president of global affairs, sent out the lengthy memo, entitled “Our position on Polarization and Election” on Friday, ahead of an expected whistleblower accusation against the company.
A former Facebook employee is set to make the claims against the company and reveal her identity in an interview tonight on US TV show “CBS 60 Minutes”, ahead of an appearance at a Senate hearing on Tuesday.
She will say that thousands of pages of internal company research that she showed federal regulators proves that the social media behemoth is deceiving the public and lawmakers in saying that its efforts to rid the platform of hate and misinformation are effective, and that it contributed to the attack on Washington’s Capitol on January 6.
According to Clegg’s memo, the whistleblower will specifically suggest that a change to Facebook’s News Feed ranking algorithm was responsible for elevating polarizing content on the platform.
But Clegg also used the memo to refute these anticipated claims and said Facebook had “developed industry-leading tools to remove hateful content and reduce the distribution of problematic content. As a result, the prevalence of hate speech on our platform is now down to about 0.05 per cent.”
He attributed America’s increasingly polarised and divisive politics to many things and said: “The rise of polarization has been the subject of swathes of serious academic research in recent years. In truth, there isn’t a great deal of consensus.”
“But what evidence there is simply does not support the idea that Facebook, or social media more generally, is the primary cause of polarization,” he wrote.
It comes just three weeks after Campaign groups accused Facebook of breaking UK equality laws by allegedly allowing businesses to target job ads based on gender.
The findings by campaign group Global Witness showed that 96 per cent of the people shown an ad for mechanic vacancies were men, while 95 per cent of nursery nurse job ads were seen by women.
The investigation also found that Facebook allowed job adverts which deliberately excluded women, or those over the age of 55, from seeing them.
Global Witness said that while it was requested during the process to tick a box saying it would not discriminate against the excluded groups, there were no other checks or obstacles to placing such targeted ads.