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Experts from some of the nation’s leading civil and digital rights organizations say a report released by Meta last week, billed as a comprehensive review of its impact on human rights, actually offers “zero” information about its actual impact on the world. Meta’s first human rights report should be seen instead, experts said, as just the latest in a long line of efforts by the company to whitewash its history of inciting hatred, violence and extremism around the world, the product of a relentless quest for more -great commitment and profit.
“Let’s be perfectly clear: This is just a long PR product with the words ‘Human Rights Report’ printed on the side,” said Jesse Lerich, co-founder of Accountable Tech, a nonprofit focused on countering misinformation.
Published on July 14, the 83-page document offers a window into Meta’s philosophy on human rights across its platforms, and was authored by its human rights director Miranda Sisson and human rights product policy manager Ian Levine, a former longtime leader in Human Rights I am watching. The report aims to take stock of potential human rights concerns related to the company’s policies, products and business model, and to respond to critics who have repeatedly slammed Meta for promoting hate and harm.
Meta’s report breaks down its approach to tough issues like government takedown requests and end-to-end encryption, and summarizes what the company sees as its impact on civil rights in multiple countries. But rights groups analyzing the document say it falls short of addressing the real-world evils caused by Facebook, Instagram and Meta’s other products. Instead, experts described the work as largely self-plagiarism, recycling past PR statements, citing them as evidence of progress on a number of important issues. A section on “Election Integrity,” for example, which boasts Meta’s efforts to “better protect elections” and “give people the chance to vote,” contains links to seven external documents—all produced by Meta itself. However, the report fails to mention that many of the safeguards it touted are no longer in place.
“The whole document is corporate propaganda masquerading as honest self-reflection,” Lehrich added, saying the company’s scheme for responding to criticism has not changed since its inception. “The question is not whether Mark Zuckerberg will have a sudden moral awakening one of these days, but when politicians will hold the tech giants to real accountability.”
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Facebook did not respond to a request for comment on the experts’ assessments of its report.
Protesters take cover behind homemade shields as they confront police during a crackdown on anti-military coup demonstrations in Yangon on March 16, 2021. Photo: STR (Getty Images)
Historically, Meta has struggled to maintain its reputation in the United States while operating in many countries that have been found to frequently violate human rights, as have many of its competitors such as Google and Twitter. Frances Haugen, a whistleblower for the company, claimed under oath last fall that Meta was “literally inciting ethnic violence” in countries like Ethiopia. Last week’s report sought — and failed — to address the controversy, rights groups told Gizmodo.
“Facebook’s human rights assessment report is 83 pages of hype and repeats promises the company has already made but failed to deliver. The report lacks pages of actual information on the human rights impact, acknowledgment or remorse for its role in atrocities around the world, or how it plans to fully implement policies, including in languages other than English,” said Wendy Via, co-founder and President of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism.
“How can a company the size of Meta adequately talk about what it does in 83 pages?”
Meta has repeatedly pointed to its renewed emphasis on encryption and attempts to curb unnecessary government takedown requests as key examples illustrating its commitment to human rights. It says it only responds to requests for user information that are “consistent with internationally recognized human rights standards” and says it is willing to reject overly broad requests that violate domestic policies or local laws. Still, some experts said Meta’s approach fails to fully address the underlying issues driving government data requests.
Meta’s hunger for increasingly intimate levels of personal data — the fuel for what is effectively its only source of revenue, advertising — is what invariably attracts governments interested in abusing access to its records, Isedua Oribhabor said. head of business and human rights at the non-profit organization Access now. “The more products and services the company has and the more ways it has to collect data, it’s just more fodder for governments to keep trying to get access to it,” she said.
Meta can demonstrate its commitment to user privacy more clearly, Oribhabor added, by collecting only the minimum amount of data necessary to operate the services it provides.
Some experts have said they have grown disillusioned with Meta’s growing list of transparency reports, describing these documents as initially seemingly helpful but ultimately lacking in impact and self-verification. Whether reporting on widely viewed content or government requests for user data, Meta’s accountability efforts are belied by a clear motivation to present the company’s rosiest image possible, rights groups said.
In 2018, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights said the company’s response to evidence it was fueling state genocide against Myanmar’s Rohingya Muslim minority had been “slow and ineffective”. The following year, UN investigator Christopher Sidoti told Gizmodo that while Meta had made some “significant” changes, the company’s response to the findings remained “almost adequate.” The UN offered no comment on the Meta Human Rights Report released last week.
About a dozen pages of the report are devoted to assessing Meta’s impact in countries such as Myanmar, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Cambodia and India—areas fraught with significant political unrest in recent years. Meta claims that its assessments provide “a detailed, direct form of human rights due diligence”, allowing it and other companies to “identify potential human rights risks and impacts” and “promote human rights” by at the same time, they seek to “prevent and reduce risks.”
Ostensibly, Meta expects these summaries to serve as an example of transparent disclosure, but experts don’t see it that way. Multiple advocacy groups described the sections as short, biased interpretations of past reports that failed to accurately capture Meta’s destabilizing role in these regions. Instead of delving deeply into the “obvious human rights risks” of the countries named, the document seems intended to leave readers with the impression that past problems have already been adequately addressed, Oribador said.
Meta fails, Oribhabor specified, “to take the extra step necessary to make the connection that because it is the primary platform for communication, it is also the primary platform for spreading hatred and inciting violence.”
A WhatsApp advertisement is seen on a newspaper at a stand in New Delhi on January 13, 2021. Photo: Sajjad Hussain (Getty Images)
Even before the report, Metta faced renewed criticism from civil and digital rights groups around the world, particularly those in Eastern Europe, India and Kenya. A much more detailed report on its impact, compiled by the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism (GPAHE) last year, accused Metta of having a “horribly damaging impact on democracies, societies and vulnerable populations around the world”, saying that fanatics populist leaders and far-right political parties had harnessed its technology to achieve “political heights possibly unattainable before.” Unlike Meta, GPAHE relies heavily on multiple independent regional sources to reach its conclusions. One such Belgrade-based NGO, the SHARE Foundation, argued that companies like Meta “simply have no incentive” to invest in content moderation in areas with “relatively small language groups” like Serbia.
The GPAHE report further highlights Facebook’s role in electing India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, whose party has fueled religious fanaticism in the country and condoned violence against India’s Muslim minority.
India’s human rights issues represent the biggest controversy surrounding Meta’s analysis of its own impact. The Real Facebook Oversight Board, a watchdog made up of global experts working to hold Meta accountable, accused the company of “whitewashing religious violence fueled in India on their platforms,” saying that while Meta had promised to consult with civil society groups before publishing last week’s report, many had “no notice of this report or any input”.
There is an independent evaluation of Meta’s role in India commissioned by the company itself. However, no one outside the Meta has seen it yet. Experts have slammed Meta’s failure to release a long-delayed assessment of its role in spreading hate speech and incitement to violence in the country. Facebook contracted Foley Hoag, an outside law firm, to conduct the assessment in 2020. The law firm reportedly interviewed about 40 civil society stakeholders, activists and journalists. The firm’s report has neither been published nor even given a publication date. Human rights groups have repeatedly accused Facebook of trying to stifle the report and narrow the scope of its findings. Even those involved in the evaluation are soured by it. Ritumbra Manuvie, one of the members of the civil society…
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