Former Facebook product manager Frances Haugen testifies before the U.S. Senate that Facebook’s products harm children, stoke division, and weaken democracy, backed by tens of thousands of internal company documents showing Facebook executives knew about Instagram’s severe mental health …
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Facebook dismantles election safety measures immediately after the 2020 vote, prematurely rolling back safeguards designed to combat misinformation despite internal warnings. The decision enables “Stop the Steal” conspiracy theories to spread virally through the platform’s …
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On February 17, 2019, YouTuber Matt Watson published a viral investigation exposing how YouTube’s recommendation algorithm facilitated what he called a “wormhole into a soft-core pedophile ring”—systematically clustering videos of minors and serving them to predators while …
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Facebook publicly admits that its platform was used to “foment division and incite offline violence” in Myanmar’s genocide against Rohingya Muslims, acknowledging the UN’s determination that Facebook played a “determining role” in violence that killed thousands …
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By 2018, comprehensive academic research from UC Berkeley, Harvard, and other institutions documented that YouTube’s recommendation algorithm systematically amplified conspiracy theories and misinformation over factual content—with some studies showing conspiracy videos received dramatically …
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Facebook’s engagement-maximizing algorithm proactively amplifies Myanmar military’s anti-Rohingya hate speech and genocide propaganda, directly contributing to systematic ethnic cleansing that kills thousands and displaces over 700,000 Rohingya Muslims. The platform’s surveillance …
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By 2016, YouTube’s recommendation algorithm had become what researchers characterized as a “radicalization engine”—systematically amplifying extremist content and pushing users down rabbit holes of increasingly radical videos because extreme content generated more watch time, which …
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