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The Facebook Apostate | She Joined Facebook to Fight Terror. Now She’s Convinced We Need to Fight Facebook.

Hannah Byrne joined Facebook to combat far-right extremism. She’s now convinced the tech giant can’t be trusted with such power.

Meta’s longtime justification of the Dangerous Organizations policy is that the company is legally obligated to censor certain kinds of speech around designated entities or it would risk violating the federal statute barring material support for terrorist groups, a view some national security scholars have vigorously rejected. One presentation expresses concern with Facebook’s transition to encrypted messaging, which would prevent authorities (and Meta itself) from eavesdropping on chats: “We will need to move our detection/enforcement/investigation signals more upstream to surfaces we do have insight into (eg., user’s behaviors on FB, past violations, social relationships, group metadata like description, image, title, etc) in order to flag areas of harm.” She worried about generalizing about one strain of violent extremism and applying it to drastically different cultures, contexts, and ideologies: “We’re saying Hamas is the exact same thing as the KKK with absolutely no basis in logic or reason or history or research.” Byrne encountered similar definitional headaches around “misinformation” and “disinformation,” which she says her team studied as potential sources of terror sympathy and wanted to incorporate into the Malicious Actor Framework.

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