Screenshot: Gizmodo/Frances Haugen
Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, a former employee with the (also former) Civic Integrity team, recently leaked thousands of internal documents, including internal employee discussions, memos, research, and presentations, to a consortium of news outlets as part of a project collectively dubbed the “Facebook Papers.” Gizmodo has the files, and we’re eager to share them with you.
There are a number of reasons we haven’t seen all of these documents released publicly—at least not yet. First, a bit about the format: Most if not all of the “documents” are actually photos of a computer screen taken with someone’s phone. While unredacted versions were shared by Haugen with the Securities and Exchange Commission as part of her whistleblower complaint, the copies we’re receiving have been redacted by her legal team. All of the internal chats and other documents were redacted to remove the names of “low-level” Facebook employees, meaning we can’t reach out to them for comment.
In addition, some of the documents contain sensitive material that would be irresponsible to publish without further redaction, which takes a lot of time.
The stories that have come out already are just the beginning—expect a lot more to be released over the coming days and weeks. We’re going to do our best to give you guys access to the raw documents as soon as possible (and there are, again, A Lot Of Them), and put them into context.
We expect to receive a new batch of documents daily, but we won’t know anything about them in advance. As we’re poring over them, we’ll be sharing our takeaways here—including links to complete files where possible.
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Our goal is to give folks outside of the consortium—and outside of journalism, more generally—access to the same material we’re seeing. Other folks have pointed out that researchers in fields like tech ethics and misinformation deserve this access, as do regulators and everyone else who’s concerned about Facebook’s outsized power. We agree and will release everything we can, as fast as we can.
See below for the latest updates, and read our latest breakout stories right here:
- The Climate Denial Is Coming From Inside Facebook’s House
- Facebook Has No Clue How to Solve Its Image Problem, Leaked Doc Shows
- How the 2019 Christchurch Massacre Changed Facebook Forever
- Leaked ‘Confidential’ Facebook Doc Reveals Internal Rift Over Handling of Political Ads
- 35 Secret Code Words Facebook Uses to Talk About Its Users and Tools
- Why the New Big Tech Anti-Algorithm Bill Is Doomed Even If It Succeeds
Editor’s note: We will be refreshing this story each day that new documents arrive with a new headline.
This story is based on Frances Haugen’s disclosures to the Securities and Exchange Commission, which were also provided to Congress in redacted form by her legal team. The redacted versions received by Congress were obtained by a consortium of news organizations, including Gizmodo, the New York Times, Politico, the Atlantic, Wired, the Verge, CNN, and dozens of other outlets.
