Meta and TikTok let harmful content rise after evidence outrage drove engagement, say whistleblowers

Once again, social media giants Facebook and TikTok have been caught red-handed.

More than a dozen whistleblowers and insiders have laid bare how the companies took risks with safety on issues including violence, sexual blackmail and terrorism as they battled for users’ attention.

An engineer at Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, described how he had been told by senior management to allow more “borderline” harmful content – which includes misogyny and conspiracy theories – in user’s feeds to compete with TikTok.

“They sort of told us that it’s because the stock price is down,” the engineer said.

↫ Marianna Spring and Mike Radford at the BBC

Meta, TikTok, and Twitter are criminal enterprises, and their executives should be trembling in court instead of scheming on yachts. Their role in legitimising far-right extremism will eventually catch up to them, and once that happens, no yacht is going to keep them safe.