In internal documents obtained by the Wall Street Journal, a whole host of people have been pushing back against Facebook for hate speech for some time now — and that list includes pop star and Only Murders in the Building comedy breakout Selena Gomez.
It all started in 2016 when Gomez visited the company’s Menlo Park headquarters to celebrate becoming the most-followed account on Instagram. When a particularly hateful response to her post on the photo opp stuck with Gomez, a spokesperson told the Journal, she reached out to Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg during the pivotal 2020 election year, urging them to take action in DMs that she later shared widely.
Now, thanks to the WSJ‘s reporting, we know Gomez also emailed the Facebook executives privately to voice her issues. Sandberg responded, saying that Facebook’s AI detected 91 percent of the 1.5 million posts it removed for violating its rules on hate speech. That was not enough for Gomez, who responded firmly.
“You refuse to even mention, let alone address, the problem Facebook has with white supremacists and bigots,” Gomez wrote in an Oct. 10, 2020 email to Sandberg and other executives. She included screenshots of Facebook groups that she says promoted violent ideologies, according to the Journal, and said there were plenty of groups “full of hate and lies that might lead to people being hurt or, even worse, killed.”
Gomez apparently took her concerns to email after her private DM to Zuckerberg and Sandberg went unanswered, and her attempt to publicly shame their lack of a response went nowhere. She told them in her previously shared DM that there was a “serious problem” at Facebook, with the platform “being used to spread hate, misinformation, racism, and bigotry.”
“I am calling on you both to HELP STOP THIS,” she said in her note, which later surfaced for public viewing in one of her Instagram Stories. Her subsequent email outreach is what’s new here, and it comes from the Journal‘s ongoing bombshell Facebook Files reports.
The documents revealing Gomez’s attempt to reach Facebook leadership were released as part of a story by the Journal that depicts how Facebook uses AI to detect hate speech — even though its AI kind of sucks. According to the Journal, the platform cut the human reviewers’ focus on hate-speech and became more dependent on AI two years ago. But the company’s AI has trouble consistently identifying the differences between videos like first-person shootings, car crashes, and cockfighting.
This comes at a particularly difficult time for the tech giant, due, in no small part, to the Facebook Files reporting. Whistleblower Frances Haugen, who leaked the documents to the Journal, also attended a Congressional hearing and plans to brief the Facebook Oversight Board. Shortly after Haugen revealed on an episode of 60 Minutes that she was the source of the leaked documents, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp shut down for nearly six hours.
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