Gizmodo reports:

In the hours following the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, employees at Facebook tasked with preventing “potential offline harm” found themselves under siege by a mob of a different sort. Reports of abusive content from users were flooding in. As one employee put it in an internal forum, many of the flagged posts “called for violence, suggested the overthrow of the government would be desirable, or otherwise voiced support for the protests.” The same day, Instagram employees reported that there were “no existing” protections against an onslaught of inciting content in places like the app’s list of most widely used hashtags.

Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer called on his staff to “Hang in there.” In response, employees began to openly accuse the company of fomenting the insurrection. One wrote, “We’ve been fueling this fire for a long time and we shouldn’t be surprised it’s now out of control.”

“Schrep, employees are tired of ‘thoughts and prayers’ from leadership,” another response read. “We want action.”

Screenshots of Meta employees’ reactions to the Jan. 6 Capitol riot were part of the Facebook Papers, a trove of documents that offer an unprecedented look inside the most powerful social media company in the world. The records were first provided to Congress last year by Frances Haugen, a Facebook product manager-turned-whistleblower, and later obtained by hundreds of journalists, including those at Gizmodo. Haugen testified before Congress about Facebook’s harms in October 2021. [Continue reading…]