Meta & Children's Online Safety

Documents / Chat: We're sexualizing underage girls, promoting some very iffy accounts, and serving this content to people who didn't ask for it instead of more inspiring interest content

Chat: We're sexualizing underage girls, promoting some very iffy accounts, and serving this content to people who didn't ask for it instead of more inspiring interest content

Internal document16 messages1 named participant, plus redacted or unnamed

Narratives:KnowledgeProfits over Safety

Open source PDF (2 pages)

A readable view of the chat, built from the transcribed text. Each row is one timestamped message in the record. Times are Pacific, as recorded. Check the Source PDF for the original layout.

████ name redacted. Different bars may be the same person or different people.

quoted in an excerpt in the archive.

Wednesday 9 September 2020

14:09████hey yall, was chatting with Tomas about how many people are complaining about sexualized content getting recommended to them in Reels https://fb.workplace.com/groups/640800339747470/permalink/927324364428398/ https://fb.workplace.com/groups/640800339747470/permalink/925870227907145/ https://fb.workplace.com/groups/640800339747470/permalink/925941417900026/ https://fb.workplace.com/groups/640800339747470/permalink/927938457700322/ Melissa Kate
14:10████Some really yucky content. We're sexualizing underage girls, promoting some very iffy accounts, and serving this content to people who didn't ask for it instead of more inspiring interest content
14:12Tomas Kabbabe SfeirThanks for flagging Melissa! I went to some of these accounts to check them out and they are FAR from being recommendable Melissa Kate
14:12████The Explore team fell into a trap where so much popular content in Explore was sexualized, it was really hard to ever make any adjustments to Explore to fix it because doing so would reduce time spent. Getting rid of it would impact communities like fitness, become really painful for our community because they were used to having that distribution which would create PR issues. So we should get ahead of this stuff before norms are established
14:13Tomas Kabbabe Sfeirwould be great to validate our classifiers and PEC metrics against these accounts Jayant
14:34████Yep, we are actually working on this as a po right now Jayant
14:34████sexual CEP is under development Melissa Kate
14:35████so glad to hear it Jayant
14:35████I made this dash to monitor any issues with ranking sources, we are running a test right now with the trending sources removed Jayant
14:35████since there was a spike in the psexual predictions of the content being served by those sources Jayant
14:35████https://fburl.com/unidash/bqs5th4m Jayant
14:37████most of these escalations are showing up on cover
14:44Tomas Kabbabe SfeirI guess this makes sense seeing how everyone sees the cover but holy smokes we need to be more careful about what we show there Jayant
15:03████yeah, definitely Jayant PLTF EX exhibitsticker.com
15:21████In case you guys are interested: https://fb.workplace.com/groups/972791323185911/permalink/1008999359565107/
19:07Tomas Kabbabe SfeirThis is a great summary. Thanks for sharing!