BREAKING: Gizmodo Becomes First News Outlet To Make the Facebook Papers Public
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Gizmodo has become the first news site to make the Facebook Papers public. Independent experts from New York University, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Columbia University, Marquette University, and the American Civil Liberties Union are partnering with Gizmodo to responsibly publish this historic leak.
“The internet not only connects us to our friends, families and communities, but it is also the foundation of the global knowledge economy.” – Mark Zuckerberg, Aug. 21, 2013.
“Facebook has been a useful instrument for those seeking to spread hate, in a context where, for most users, Facebook is the Internet.” – United Nations Human Rights Council, Sept. 12, 2018.
Gizmodo: In one of Silicon Valley’s largest leaks, a former Facebook product manager slipped financial regulators stacks of documents containing thousands of confidential memos, chat logs, and a veritable library of hidden research. The leak was designed to convince the feds that the gravity and scope of Facebook’s design flaws and misdeeds vastly exceed anything its executives ever divulged to their investors.
The documents, captured by whistleblower Frances Haugen and first reported by the Wall Street Journal, were also handed to members of a Senate Commerce subcommittee chaired by Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat of Connecticut who last month called Instagram “a breeding ground for eating disorders and self harm.”
And it’s from here that Gizmodo and some 300 other mostly Western journalists derived their access. In a statement Gizmodo said: “We believe there’s a strong public need in making as many of the documents public as possible, as quickly as possible. To that end, we’ve partnered with a small group of independent monitors, who are joining us to establish guidelines for an accountable review of the documents prior to publication. The mission is to minimize any costs to individuals’ privacy or the furtherance of other harms while ensuring the responsible disclosure of the greatest amount of information in the public interest.”
