CfA's May 20, 2022 Newsletter
This week, as Campaign for Accountability and the Tech Transparency Project (TTP) joined a coalition of advocacy organizations in the #MakeMarkListen campaign to demand accountability from Meta’s upper management, TTP put out a series of reports demonstrating the need for sustained scrutiny of online platforms.
- A TTP report exposed Facebook’s efforts to avoid increased oversight through its funding of the anti-regulatory dark money group, American Edge Project (AEP). After a year-long effort to track AEP’s spending across all advertising mediums in 2021, TTP worked with The Washington Post on an exposé of the group to put its Big Tech influence tactics into context. The group’s Form 990 filings, which TTP uncovered and provided exclusively to The Post, expose how a web of Facebook-funded grants pay for increased enthusiasm against antitrust legislation from AEP member groups, who regularly recycle the group’s talking points in op-eds and on social media to create the façade of widespread support.
- Another TTP investigation revealed that Instagram remains a dangerous place for teens to find and connect with drug dealers, months after CEO Adam Mosseri was confronted by TTP’s original research on the topic during his Senate testimony in December. The new findings show little has changed and it is still easy for a teen user to find drugs ranging from xanax to fentanyl on the platform, with some instances of Instagram's own algorithm recommending accounts claiming to sell drugs.
- Also this week, TTP worked with The New York Times to show that Facebook is monetizing the searches of users trying to find videos of the recent livestreamed mass-shooting in Buffalo, New York. This finding shows that Meta is not only failing to remove these horrific videos from the platform, but is actively profiting from them.
- Facebook’s failure to remove mass-shooting videos from the platform stretches back years. In 2020, TTP published a report showing that videos of the 2019 mass shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand remained on the platform over a year after the attack.
- Earlier this week, The New York Times confronted Facebook with the fact that three of the videos identified in TTP’s 2020 report were still on the platform, more than two years after we revealed them, and three years after the attack.
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Michelle Kuppersmith
Executive Director, Campaign for Accountability
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