Facebook’s Civil Rights Audit These technologies are designed to engage users and keep them coming back, which is pushing us further apart and isolating Americans into information silos.” The Chairman further expressed concern about how Facebook’s algorithm works and whether it prioritizes engagement and attention in a manner that rewards extreme and divisive content. Facebook argues that the Wall Street Journal article used isolated incidents where leadership chose not to approve a possible intervention to make the argument that Facebook doesn’t care about polarization in general. Facebook reports it has commissioned internal & external research, which have informed several measures the company has taken to fight polarization. Examples include: • Recalibrating News Feed. In 2018, Facebook changed News Feed ranking to prioritize posts from friends and family over news content. Additionally, Facebook reports reducing clickbait headlines, reducing links to spam and misleading posts, and improving comment rankings to show people higher quality information. • Growth of Its Integrity Team. Facebook has spent the last four years building a global integrity team that addresses safety and security issues, including polarization. This dedicated team was not in place when some of the internal research referenced was produced. • Restricting Recommendations. If Pages and Groups repeatedly share content that violates Facebook’s Community Standards, or is rated false by fact-checkers, Facebook reports that it reduces those Pages’ distribution, and removes them from recommendations. The Auditors do not believe that Facebook is sufficiently attuned to the depth of concern on the issue of polarization and the way that the algorithms used by Facebook inadvertently fuel extreme and polarizing content (even with the measures above). The Auditors believe that Facebook should do everything in its power to prevent its tools and algorithms from driving people toward self-reinforcing echo chambers of extremism, and that the company must recognize that failure to do so can have dangerous (and lifethreatening) real-world consequences. (iii) Hate Speech Data & Analysis. The Auditors recommend that Facebook compile data and further study how hate speech manifests on the platform against particular protected groups to enable it to devote additional resources to understanding the form and prevalence of different kinds of hate on the platform, its causes (e.g., policy gaps, global enforcement trends or training issues, etc.), and to identify potential remedial steps the company could take. Currently, when content reviewers remove content for expressing hate against a protected group or groups, Facebook does not capture data as to the protected group(s) against whom the hate speech was directed. Similarly, when users report content as violating hate speech policies, they do not have a way to note which protected class(es) are being attacked in the post. Without this information, Facebook lacks specific metrics for evaluating and understanding: (1) the volume of hate broken down by the group targeted, (2) whether there are categories of attacks on particular groups that are prevalent but not consistently removed, (3) whether there 56