take us through the context of this. what is your reporting based on and what were the do in creating these profiles. yeah, hey, chris. so this was one of tens of thousands of documents that we have been poring over looking at the documents that whistleblower frances haugen has handed over to the sec and congress. a lot of these documents were also the basis of those blockbuster wall street journal reports we saw. so we ve been poring over these documents and this is one of many example of internal research we saw that genius researchers, really, inside facebook. we re talking ph.d.s who really know their stuff had been doing to sound the alarm to facebook s product divisions and facebook s feature and facebook executives to say you are causing harm on your platform.
abdication of responsibility. how are we expected to ignore when leadership overrides research-based policy decisions to better serve people like the groups inciting violence today? joining us now are nbc news correspondent jake ward, and early facebook investor roger mcnamee, also the author of zucked. give us a sense what have stood out to you and what did you hear back from facebook as did you your reporting? geoff, what s extraordinary is these are not documents and complaints being raised by outside journalists or academics. these are internal researchers, ph.d. s and the like hired by facebook to help them understand us better and understand their own product better. and the objections and concerns these researchers are bringing up are about the things that make facebook what it is. comments, likes, shares.
in some of the internal reports we saw them building upon research that had already been done with youtube to see how the video and recommendation machines pushed people into rabbit holes. we see the same things at other social media companies. the thing that stands out is that facebook really does have the industry leading in-house research organization. they have geniuses with ph.d.s working with them to figure out problems. they ve done a good job. the documents show through the heart breaking messages from former and even current employees that say they feel like their visions of changing things from inside of facebook has been dashed and the company doesn t use the researchers and findings to make the platform better. and jake, it s not just journalists and members of congress who are looking at this. it s also the sec. do we have any sense of what they re looking for inside facebook?