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Facebook Papers | How Algorithms promoted Polarization and Hatred | Dhruv Rathee - YouTube
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Hello, friends!
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One of the largest social media platforms in the world,
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Facebook is under some serious allegations.
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It's being said that Facebook has encouraged hate speech and violence
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in several countries across the globe.
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Indirectly supported extremist groups and misinformation
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and because of Facebook's algorithm in many places around the world,
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instances of riots and violence were seen in real life.
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These allegations were made by none other than an ex-employee of Facebook.
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Thousands of internal documents of Facebook have been leaked.
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Through which we came to know all this.
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These leaked documents are now known as the 'Facebook Papers.'
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"Pressure has been mounting on tech giant Facebook
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after a former employee, Frances Haugen,
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turned a whistle-blower."
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"...has told US lawmakers,
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that she believes Facebook's products
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harm children, stoke division and weaken democracy."
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"My fear is that without action,
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divisive and extremist behaviour that we see today
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are only the beginning."
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"Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is responding to the leaked documents
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that suggest that the platform took little action
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to address its role in spreading misinformation."
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The first question to arise is
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who leaked these internal documents?
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Who is the whistle-blower?
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The answer to it, friends, is Frances Haugen.
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This 37-year old woman,
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who is an engineer,
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had a really successful tech career.
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She has been the product manager in multiple large companies.
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Like Google+, Pinterest and Yelp.
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According to her LinkedIn profile,
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she has done a management program at Harvard Business School.
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And then went on to co-found a dating platform.
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In 2018, Facebook had approached her
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to join their company.
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She had insisted then that she would work
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only at a role where she could counter fake information.
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A job related to democracy.
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Facebook had then employed her in 2019.
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In their Civic Integrity team.
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This team was created by Facebook,
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to see over the election interference all over the world.
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But this team was disbanded,
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after the 2020 US Presidential Election.
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When this happened, it bothered Frances,
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and she started feeling disillusioned.
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She felt that Facebook wasn't serious about countering election interference.
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But she still continued working at the company.
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But with the passage of time,
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her frustration only grew.
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She saw Facebook's inaction
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about countering misinformation.
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Because of the misinformation spread on Facebook,
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cases of violence were seen around the world.
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When she had enough of that, finally in May 2021,
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she resigned from her job.
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But some weeks before she resigned,
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she copied and downloaded thousands of internal documents from the company's computers.
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And she decided to become a whistle-blower,
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and reveal this to the world.
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After doing so, she reached out to
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a journalist of the Wall Street Journal.
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But as I told you in the video on Pandora Papers,
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when there are so many documents,
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one person can't start analysing all the documents.
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Help from many other people is needed.
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That's why, in this case too,
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17 other news organisations of the US came together,
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and formed a consortium
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and they were all given access to the documents.
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The organisations then started analysing the documents.
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Washington Post, New York Times, Associated Press,
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The Atlantic, Reuters, The Wire, CNN were among the big names.
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Additionally, a consortium of some European News agencies was also formed.
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They were given all the documents.
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They analysed these and then
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this revelation was brought to the public.
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This project was named The Facebook Papers.
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To show how serious she is about the allegations,
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not only did Frances approach the media,
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but she also filed 8 complaints against Facebook at the US Securities Exchange Commission.
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Apart from this, on 5th October,
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she appeared before the US Senate Committee
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to record her testimony.
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Frances has said that through this revelation,
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she isn't aiming to defame Facebook.
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Instead, she wants Facebook to acknowledge these
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and to rectify the internal problems.
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Because of Facebook's algorithm,
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democracy is literally in danger all around the world.
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Children are in danger.
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And violence is spreading globally.
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"Having worked in four different types of social networks,
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I understand how complex and nuanced these problems are.
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However,
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the choices being made inside Facebook are disastrous.
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For our children, our public safety, our privacy and for our democracy.
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And that is why we must demand Facebook make changes."
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How is it happening exactly?
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Come, let's talk about what's revealed in the Facebook Papers.
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In February 2019, researchers set up a dummy account on social media,
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to see the experience of an Indian user.
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The aim was to see what the Facebook algorithm would recommend to this user.
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And the recommendations that they saw,
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were shocking.
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This test account,
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within 3 weeks,
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was inundated with fake news and inciteful things on its newsfeed.
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Violence, photos of beheadings,
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photos of corpses,
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within 3 weeks, Facebook started recommending these to this dummy account.
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This showed that Facebook's algorithm recommends such hateful and violent things on its own.
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If you remember, around February 2019, the Pulwama attack had happened.
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So this experiment was quite related to it.
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Because in this experiment it was found that
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the hateful and violent posts
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were often against Pakistan.
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Several images with fake news were being circulated
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with fake photos of bombs
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and crudest of the crude language was being used against the people of Pakistan.
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Against a specific community,
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and the researchers had even observed that
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their video service Facebook Watch,
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the feed for videos on Facebook,
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if the user didn't put in the type of videos they wanted to watch,
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by liking different videos,
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then the algorithm automatically recommended
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were pornographic videos.
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Softcore porn.
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This internal report was named
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Today, the thousands of documents leaked by Frances Haugen,
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one of those documents, one of those reports, is this.
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In its response, Facebook's spokesperson has said
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that Facebook tries to always
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minimalise hate speech on their platform.
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They said that after this report,
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Facebook had made changes to their algorithm to improve the system.
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It sounds fair.
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It sounds like Facebook took action after the research.
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But many other documents in the Facebook Papers,
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show that
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the reality isn't how Facebook is depicting.
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The first thing to be noted was that
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the money spent by Facebook
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for fighting misinformation,
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for fighting fake news,
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87% of their budget
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is spent only on one country.
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The United States.
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Only 13% of their budget is used
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to fight fake news in the rest of the world.
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Inequality and injustice like this,
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can be seen at many places in the world
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in many aspects.
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But for jobs at least,
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The job postings on the Hirect app
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There are no consultancies or middlemen.
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and spam-free.
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If you are a job seeker,
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And it is very easy to use the app.
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Install this app.
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And then you'd have to answer some questions
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and based on your profile,
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the algorithm of the app will match you with the recruiters
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where you can potentially get jobs.
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So do check it out
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Coming back to the topic.
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Secondly, these documents have revealed that
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even if Facebook wanted to fight against hate speech,
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it couldn't do so
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because in several languages,
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the technology wasn't available to Facebook
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to detect violence and hate speech.
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For example, for Hindi and Bangla,
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Facebook did not have classifiers.
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What are classifiers?
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These are basically Facebook language algorithms
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that could automatically detect hate speech
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and violent posts.
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Facebook has admitted to it
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that for Hindi and Bangla languages,
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they put up the classifiers in violence and incitement categories
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only in early 2021.
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At the beginning of this year.
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Before this,
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their algorithms couldn't even recognise the violent posts in Hindi and Bangla.
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And even today, as per Facebook's spokesperson,
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that they have the classifiers for only 5 Indian languages.
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Whereas Facebook is present in more than 20 languages in India.
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It means that to spread violence and hate speech over Facebook, in those languages,
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is very easy and without any consequences.
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In its defence,
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Facebook claims that even though they do not have the technology or the algorithms,
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to fight hate speech,
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but they have a dedicated team of 15,000 people for India
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for content review
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that covers the 20 Indian languages.
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As an example, they've said
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that since May 15th 2021,
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to August 31st 2021,
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their team proactively removed 877,000 pieces of hate speech content in India.
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When Facebook is acknowledging
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that their team of humans had helped in removing hate speech from their platform,
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what's the issue?
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The issue, friends, is that
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the next thing exposed in the Facebook Papers is that
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Facebook isn't impartial at removing all types of hate speech.
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Facebook lets some hate speech remain on the platform.
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This was revealed in an internal report titled
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Wall Street Journal quotes this study
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"much of the content posted by users, groups and pages
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from the Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh group or RSS
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is never flagged."
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Meaning that most of the content posted by the RSS group,
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is never flagged.
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And why?
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Because Facebook has designated RSS
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as not to be removed
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because of 'political sensitivities.'
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What are these 'political sensitivities?'
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The New York Times reports
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that this is basically Facebook's concerns
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about its operations in the country.
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Facebook is worried that they wouldn't be able to properly continue their business in India
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if it started doing this.
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Some other examples that were revealed were
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the violent content of Bajrang Dal.
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Even before this, a similar disclosure had been made.
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In August 2020.
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Wall Street Journal had written an article regarding this.
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When a BJP politician had given an extremely violent hate speech against Muslims.
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Who was the politician?
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Anurag Thakur, Pravesh Mishra, Adityantha, Tejasvi Surya weren't the ones.
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Instead, it was T. Raja.
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He had literally threatened to shoot people.
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Some Facebook employees felt that as per the rules,
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he should be labelled as a 'dangerous individual'
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and banned from the website.
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Facebook employees were about to ban him,
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but Facebook India's top Public Policy Executive,
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Ankhi Das stopped them.
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Apparently, the article quotes Ankhi Das,
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that she had told her employees,
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"...punishing violations by politicians from Mr Modi鈥檚 party
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would damage the company鈥檚 business prospects in the country."
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They were literally saying that
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they cannot remove the hate speech
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or else their business prospects would be affected in India.
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When this expose took place,
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2 months later,
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Ankhi Das resigns from Facebook.
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Saying that she wants to pursue her interest in public service
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was the reason for her resignations.
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In December 2020,
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another article was published in the Wall Street Journal.
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It claims that the safety team of Facebook
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has reached the conclusion that
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Bajrang Dal had supported violence in India.
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That's why it should be designated as a 'dangerous organisation.'
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And the organisation should be banned from Facebook.
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But still, this action wasn't taken.
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'Fearing possible attacks.'
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Facebook is scared yet again.
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For the record, let me tell you, friends,
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this isn't happening only in India,
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similar stories regarding Facebook are heard
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from many countries across the world.
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For example, take the case of Vietnam.
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The ruling party in Vietnam is the Communist Party.
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The voices of its opposition are being squelched similarly.
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There also, Facebook has allegedly
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banned the people speaking against the Communist Party from its platform
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or removed their opinions from Facebook.
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Because Facebook was worried
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about Vietnam banning Facebook from the country.
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Now hearing this, you might say that Facebook isn't really at fault.
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Facebook is forced to do so.
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To protect democracy and people's lives
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should Facebook lose out on a huge market?
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It was a question of Facebook's survival.
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Facebook as a company wants to survive,
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that's why it is forced to do such things.
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If you think like this,
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then here is the next allegation.
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It is said that Facebook has intentionally
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chosen profits over people.
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How?
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Frances Haugen has revealed that around 2018,
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Facebook changed its news feed algorithm.
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Earlier,
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the posts were sorted by recent.
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The most recent post by your friends
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would be at the top of the news feed.
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But now, Facebook has changed it to
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sorting by activity by default.
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Meaning the post with the most likes and comments,
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would be at the top.
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And the posts that would be more relevant based on your likes,
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would also be at the top.
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It means that what you see on your news feed now,
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is according to your likes.
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You see the things that you already like.
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The political opinions that you already have,
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you'd see the same political opinions on your news feed.
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Earlier when everything was sorted by time,
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you'd often see the counter-opinions from people.
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Things with which you might disagree with.
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Because everything is being aligned with your likes,
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social media bubbles are being created.
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It creates Polarization.
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This was explained very well
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in the Netflix documentary, The Social Dilemma.
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And because Facebook promotes those posts with more likes and comments,
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it increases the chances of breeding negativity as well.
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Think about it.
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On which post would you comment more?
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A post that is a happy,
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that pleases you, a post by your friend?
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Or a post that is very debatable?
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With a lot of controversy going on in the comments,
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and you write your opinion there
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and another person comments on your opinion
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you reply they reply, an argument ensues,
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there's debate, controversy and anger.
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Posts like these get more comments.
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And that is why those are promoted more by the algorithms.
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I'd say that this thing is present on YouTube too, to an extent
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because the videos which do not have much controversy in them
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without much racy content,
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like my video on Ravi Dahiya,
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or the video on Vrikshit Foundation,
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get the least amount of views.
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And the videos which are full of controversy,
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get the most views.
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Like the video on Kangana Ranaut,
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or the video on Aryan Khan.
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You can say that it is human nature,
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that people are more attracted to controversy.
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A big example of this is Facebook's QAnon conspiracy theory.
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This came up in the USA around 2017.
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This conspiracy theory says that the world is controlled by a secret group
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who worship demons.
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Its members include Barack Obama, George Soros,
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Tom Hanks and the Dalai Lama.
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Researchers have discovered that if you
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liked Donald Trump's page,
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some days later this QAnon conspiracy theories page was suggested as well.
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Automatically by Facebook's algorithm.
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It isn't that the algorithm was developed to do these underhanded things.
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The algorithm is merely designed around human nature.
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The things that you like are the things you're shown repeatedly.
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This leads to polarization.
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And this is how you get sucked into the circle of conspiracy theories.
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Because in that group, you wouldn't find anyone
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who would present a counter opinion.
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Because if someone were against it,
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they'd be shown things that they like.
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Eventually, what was the consequence of this?
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We witnessed the Capital Riots in the USA.
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A coup in Myanmar.
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Ethnic violence in Ethiopia.
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Experts believe that these three examples
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were the consequences of Facebook's algorithm.
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Many Facebooks employees felt frustrated about this
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and many had resigned from their jobs at Facebook.
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Other than these, the internal documents also reveal
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how the body image issues in girls
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were worsened by Facebook.
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For every 1 in 3 teenage girls,
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after joining Facebook,
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they feel more insecure
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about their body image.
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In an internal project by Facebook in 2019,
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named Project Daisy,
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aimed at improving the mental health among people.
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How?
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A presentation was shown to Mark Zuckerberg.
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With the suggestion to hide the number of likes,
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if people wouldn't be able to see the likes,
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people would feel less insecure
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about sharing their post.
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It would even lower the anxiety
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among the teenagers and young people.
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But this plan was later discarded.
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And rejected claiming that it was 'ineffective.'
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Additionally, there was also a complaint
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that in 2019, Facebook and Instagram knew
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that their platforms were being used
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for even human trafficking.
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There are so many things revealed by the internal documents
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that this video may take hours.
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But for now, I'd like to stop here.
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Facebook has denied these allegations.
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Although, they haven't claimed that the internal documents are fake,
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instead, they've said that these documents were cherry-picked
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to defame Facebook.
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But the whistle-blowers have said that
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there was nothing to cherry-pick,
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there were only cherries.
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Facebook has acknowledged that
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they need to bring more regulations and improvements
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to make their platform better.
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Talking about solutions, it is very clear here
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that Facebook has to take action regarding them as soon as possible.
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To change their algorithms.
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Because here lives are at stake literally.
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But what can you do as an individual?
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For this, my suggestion would be that friends,
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when you surf social media,
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when you're scrolling,
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do so consciously.
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Think about it and realise that
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what you are shown on your news feed,
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are according to your likes and dislikes.
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Ensure that you are not going down the rabbit hole of a conspiracy.
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Getting enraged against a community or some people,
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and are being violently provoked against them.
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Look into yourself.
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You may think that you are making a conscious decision while scrolling,
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but remember this is their algorithm,
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that is perhaps making you their puppet.
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Always be aware.
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This would be my only advice here.
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Thank you very much!
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