This was a paid advertisement that ran on facebook in october of 2019. it says quote breaking news, mark zuckerberg and facebook just endorsed donald trump for reelection. you re probably shocked. you might be thinking how could this possibly be true. it was not true. neither facebook founder mark zuckerberg nor the company he runs offered any kind of public political endorsement of any of the candidates in 2020 from either party but there it was, in black and white, in a facebook ad on mark zuckerberg s own platform, claiming that he had made this endorsement that he hadn t really made. here was it showing up nevertheless being seen by thousands and thousands and thousands of people even though it was false. reason this ad was allowed to stay up on facebook was because it was paid for by elizabeth warren and her presidential campaign. according to facebook s own
Rules, that essentially gave her a free pass to lie as much as she wanted, to say whatever she wanted on facebook s platform as long as it was part of a paid political ad for her campaign. ahead of the 2020 presidential campaign, facebook announced that any ad paid for by a political candidate would be exempt from facebook s fact checking protocols. the practical implication of that is exactly what you think, politicians were formally allowed on facebook to spread any lie they wanted about their opponents with total impunity. that, for example, is how donald trump was allowed to run facebook ads falsely accusing joe biden of corruption. with her deliberately transparently false ads, senator warren set out not only to test the system but also to demonstrate how dangerous facebook could be with only stupid rules in place, without proper safeguards in place to make sure they weren t just spreading known base lies.
It s been making headlines all weekend and into today. there s dozens of stories that have derived from these documents, dozens of stories, and multiple news outlets, nationwide and worldwide. and i m sure we re going to get a lot more stories out of these documents in the coming days. one of the more harrowing pictures that is starting to form already revolves around what appears to be a fairly routine test to see where it s algorithm is leading its users. in the summer of 2019, a researcher at facebook made a dummy account, a fake account for a person named carol smith. this fake carol smith persona was set up sort of generically. a politically conservative mom from north carolina, from wilmington, north carolina, she expressed in her facebook profile as she signed up an interest in politics and parenting and christianity and
Just endorsed donald trump for re-election. you re probably shocked. you might be thinking how could this possibly be true. it was not true. neither facebook founder mark zuckerberg nor the company he runs offered any kind of public political endorsement of any of the candidates in 2020 from either party, but there it was, in black and white in a facebook ad on mark zuckerberg s own platform, claiming that he had made this endorsement that he hadn t really made. here was it showing up nevertheless being seen by thousands and thousands and thousands of people even though it was false. reason this ad was allowed to stay up on facebook was because it was paid for by elizabeth warren and her presidential campaign. according to facebook s own rules, that essentially gave her a free pass to lie as much as she wanted, to say whatever she wanted on facebook s platform as long as it was part of a paid political ad for her campaign. ahead of the 2020 presidential
Carol s journey to qanon. but even after that was found and reported inside facebook by their own researchers, nothing happened. at least not a lot happened that we can tell, and that was not a standalone incident. an incredibly similar thing happened with dummy account in india this 2019. instead of a conservative mom being told to go full qanon, though, in this piece, the dummy account was a 21-year-old indian woman set up as a generic account set up without expressing much interest in anything, very quickly being flooded with quite disgusting, quite lurid, anti-muslim hate speech and propaganda. the facebook researcher who built that account said, quote, the test feed s news feed is a constant barrage of misinformation, violence, and gore. again, just by following facebook s recommendations. now, in response to these test cases, facebook has pointed to