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<\/p>\n\n\n\nShe Joined Facebook to Fight Terror. Now She\u2019s Convinced We Need to Fight Facebook.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
SUPPORT US<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Illustration: Vicky Leta for The Intercept<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sam Biddle<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n December 4 2024, 12:07 p.m. (TheIntercept.com)<\/p>\n\n\n\n FOR TWO YEARS<\/strong>, Hannah Byrne was part of an invisible machine that determines what over 3 billion people around the world can say on the internet. From her perch within Meta\u2019s Counterterrorism and Dangerous Organizations team, Byrne helped craft one of the most powerful and secretive censorship policies in internet history. Her work adhered to the basic tenet of content moderation: Online speech can cause offline harm. Stop the bad speech \u2014 or bad speakers \u2014 and you have perhaps saved a life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In college and early in her career, Byrne had dedicated herself to the field of counterterrorism and its attempt to catalog, explain, and ultimately deter non-state political violence. She was most concerned with violent right-wing extremism: neo-Nazis infiltrating Western armies, Klansmen plotting on Facebook pages, and Trumpist militiamen marching on the Capitol.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In video meetings with her remote work colleagues and in the conference rooms of Menlo Park, California, with the MAGA riot of January 6 fresh in her mind, Byrne believed she was in the right place at the right time to make a difference.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And then Russia invaded Ukraine. A country of under 40 million found itself facing a full-scale assault by one of the largest militaries in the world. Standing between it and Russian invasion were the capable, battle-tested fighters of the Azov Battalion \u2014 a unit founded as the armed wing of a Ukrainian neo-Nazi movement. What followed not only shook apart Byrne\u2019s plans for her own life, but also her belief in content moderation and counterterrorism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Today, she is convinced her former employer cannot be trusted with power so vast, and that the systems she helped build should be dismantled. For the first time, Byrne shares her story with The Intercept, and why the public should be as disturbed by her work as she came to be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Through a spokesperson, Meta told The Intercept that Byrne\u2019s workplace concerns \u201cdo not match the reality\u201d of how policy is enforced at the company.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Byrne grew up in the small, predominantly white Boston suburb of Natick. She was 7 years old when the World Trade Center was destroyed and grew up steeped in a binary American history<\/a> of good versus evil, hopeful she would always side neatly with the former.<\/p>\n\n\n\n School taught her that communism was bad, Martin Luther King Jr. ended American racism, and the United States had only ever been a force for peace. Byrne was determined after high school to work for the CIA in part because of reading about its origin story as the Nazi-fighting Office of Strategic Services during World War II. \u201cI was a 9\/11 kid with a poor education and a hero complex,\u201d Byrne said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And so Byrne joined the system, earning an undergraduate degree in political science at Johns Hopkins and then enrolling in a graduate research program in \u201cterrorism and sub-state violence\u201d at Georgetown University\u2019s Center for Security Studies. Georgetown\u2019s website highlights how many graduates from the Center go on to work at places like the Department of Defense, Department of State, Northrop Grumman \u2014 and Meta.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It was taken for granted that the program would groom graduates for the intelligence community, said Jacq Fulgham, who met Byrne at Georgetown. But even then, Fulgham remembers Byrne as a rare skeptic willing to question American imperialism: \u201cHannah always forced us to think about every topic and to think critically.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Part of her required reading at Georgetown included \u201cA Time to Attack: The Looming Iranian Nuclear Threat,\u201d by former Defense Department official Matthew Kroenig. The book advocates for preemptive air war against Iran to end the country\u2019s nuclear ambitions. Byrne was shocked that the premise of bombing a country of 90 million \u2014 <\/strong>presumably killing many innocent people \u2014 to achieve the ideological and political ends of the United States would be considered within the realm of educated debate and not an act of terrorism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That\u2019s because terrorism, her instructors insisted, was not something governments do. Part of terror\u2019s malign character is its perpetration by \u201cnon-state actors\u201d: thugs, radicals, militants, criminals, and assassins. Not presidents or generals<\/a>. Unprovoked air war against Iran was within the realm of polite discussion, but there was never \u201cthe same sort of critical thinking to what forms of violence might be appropriate for Hamas\u201d or other non-state groups, she recalls.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Police Raid Pro-Palestine Students\u2019 Home in FBI-Led Graffiti Investigation<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Akela Lacy<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Guess Who Profits From Trump\u2019s Deportation Plan? Private Equity Firms.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Matt Sledge<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n The White House Gave Israel Coordinates to Save an American\u2019s Family. Then Israel Bombed Them Again.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Kavitha Chekuru<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n As part of her program at Georgetown, Byrne studied abroad in places where \u201cnon-state violence\u201d was not a textbook topic but real life. Interviews with former IRA militants in Belfast, ex-FARC soldiers in Colombia, and Palestinians living under Israeli occupation complicated the terrorism binary. Rather than cartoon villains, Byrne met people who felt pushed<\/a> to violence <\/a>by the overwhelming reach<\/a> and power <\/a>of the United States and its allies. Wherever she went, Byrne said, she met people victimized<\/a>, not protected by her country. This was a history she had never been taught.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Despite feeling dismayed about the national security sector, Byrne still harbored a temptation to fix it from within. After receiving her master\u2019s and entering a State Department-sponsored immersion language class in India, still hopeful for an eventual job at the CIA or National Security Agency, she got a job at the RAND Corporation as a defense analyst. \u201cI hoped I\u2019d be able to continue to learn and write about \u2018terrorism,\u2019 which I now knew to be \u2018resistance movements,\u2019 in an academic way,\u201d Byrne said. Instead, her two years at RAND were focused on the traditional research the think tank is known for, <\/strong>contributing to titles like \u201cCountering Violent Nonstate Actor Financing: Revenue Sources, Financing Strategies, and Tools of Disruption.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cShe was all in on a career in national security,\u201d recalled a former RAND co-worker who spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity. \u201cShe was earnest in the way a lot of inside-the-Beltway recent grads can be,\u201d they added. \u201cShe still had a healthy amount of sarcasm. But I think over time that turned into cynicism.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Unfulfilled at RAND, Byrne found what she thought could be a way to both do good and honor her burgeoning anti-imperial politics: Fighting the enemy at home. She decided her next step would be a job that let her focus on the threat of white supremacists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Facebook needed the help. A mob inflamed <\/a>by white supremacist rhetoric <\/a>had stormed <\/a>the U.S. Capitol, and Facebook yet again found itself pilloried<\/a> for providing an organizing tool for extremists. Byrne came away from job interviews with Facebook\u2019s policy team convinced the company would let her fight a real danger in a way the federal national security establishment would not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Instead, she would come to realize she had joined the national security state in microcosm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Byrne joined Meta in September 2021.<\/p>\n\n\n\n She and her team helped draft the rulebook that applies to the world\u2019s most diabolical people and groups: the Ku Klux Klan, cartels, and of course, terrorists. Meta bans these so-called Dangerous Organizations and Individuals, or DOI, from using its platforms, but further prohibits its billions of users from engaging in \u201cglorification,\u201d \u201csupport,\u201d or \u201crepresentation\u201d of anyone on the list.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Byrne\u2019s job was not only to keep dangerous organizations off Meta properties, but also to prevent their message from spreading across the internet and spilling into the real world. The ambiguity and subjectivity inherent to these terms has made the \u201cDOI\u201d policy a perennial source of over-enforcement and controversy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n A full copy of the secret list<\/a> obtained by The Intercept in 2021 showed it was disproportionately comprised of Muslim, Arab, and southeast Asian entities, hewing closely to the foreign policy crosshairs of the United States. Much of the list is copied directly from federal blacklists like the Treasury Department\u2019s Specially Designated Global Terrorist roster.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A 2022 third-party audit<\/a> commissioned by Meta found the company had violated the human rights of Palestinian users, in part, due to over-enforcement of the DOI policy. Meta\u2019s in-house Oversight Board has repeatedly reversed content removed through the policy, and regularly asks the company to disclose the contents of the list and information about how it\u2019s used.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Meta\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Byrne tried to focus on initiatives and targets that she could feel good about, like efforts to block violent white supremacists from using the company\u2019s VR platform or running Facebook ads. At first she was pleased to see that Meta\u2019s in-house list went further than the federal roster in designating white supremacist organizations like the Klan \u2014 or the Azov Battalion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Still, Byrne had doubts about the model because of the clear intimacy between American state policy and Meta\u2019s content moderation policy. Meta\u2019s censorship systems are \u201cbasically an extension of the government,\u201d Byrne said in an interview.<\/p>\n\n\n\n She was also unsure of whether Meta was up to the task of maintaining a privatized terror roster. \u201cWe had this huge problem where we had all of these groups and we didn\u2019t really have \u2026 any sort of ongoing check or list of evidence of whether or not these groups were terrorists,\u201d she said, a characterization the company rejected.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Byrne quickly found that the blacklist was flexible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Meta\u2019s censorship systems are \u201cbasically an extension of the government.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n In February 2022, as Russia prepared its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Byrne learned firsthand just how mercurial the corporate mirroring of State Department policy could be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As an armed white supremacist group with credible allegations<\/a> of human rights violations hanging over it, Azov had landed on the Dangerous Organizations list, which meant the unit\u2019s members couldn\u2019t use Meta platforms like Facebook, nor could any users of those platforms praise the unit\u2019s deeds. But with Russian tanks and troops massing along the border, Ukraine\u2019s well-trained Azov fighters became the vanguard of anti-Russian resistance, and their status as international pariahs a sudden liability for American geopolitics. Within weeks, Byrne found the moral universe around her inverted: The heavily armed hate group sanctioned by Congress since 2018<\/a> were now freedom fighters resisting occupation, not terroristic racists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As a Counterterrorism and Dangerous Organizations policy manager, Byrne\u2019s entire job was to help form policies that would most effectively thwart groups like Azov. Then one day, this was no longer the case. \u201cThey\u2019re no longer neo-Nazis,\u201d Byrne recalls a policy manager explaining to her somewhat shocked team, a line that is now the official position<\/a> of the White House.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Shortly after the delisting, The Intercept reported that Meta rules had been quickly altered<\/a> to \u201callow praise of the Azov Battalion when explicitly and exclusively praising their role in defending Ukraine OR their role as part of the Ukraine\u2019s National Guard.\u201d Suddenly, billions of people were permitted to call the historically neo-Nazi Azov movement \u201creal heroes,\u201d according to policy language obtained by The Intercept at the time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Byrne and other concerned colleagues were given an opportunity to dissent and muster evidence that Azov fighters had not in fact reformed. Byrne said that even after gathering photographic evidence to the contrary, Meta responded that while Azov may have harbored Nazi sympathies in recent years, posts violating the company\u2019s rules had sufficiently tapered off.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The odds felt stacked: While their bosses said they were free to make their case that the Battalion should remain blacklisted, they had to pull their evidence from Facebook \u2014 a platform that Azov fighters ostensibly weren\u2019t allowed to use in the first place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cKey to that assessment \u2014 which everyone at Facebook knew, but coming from the outside sounds ridiculous \u2014 is that we\u2019re actually pretty bad at keeping content off the platform. Especially neo-Nazi content,\u201d Byrne recalls. \u201cSo internally, it was like, \u2018Oh, there should be lots of evidence online if they\u2019re neo-Nazis because there\u2019s so many neo-Nazis on our platform.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Though she was not privy to deliberations about the choice to delist the Azov Battalion, Byrne is adamant in her suspicion that it was done to support the U.S.-backed war effort. \u201cI know the U.S. government is in constant contact with Facebook employees,\u201d she said. \u201cIt is so clear that it was a political decision.\u201d Byrne had taken this job to prevent militant racism from spilling over into offline violence. Now, her team was instead loosening its rules for an armed organization whose founder had once declared Ukraine\u2019s destiny was to \u201clead the white races of the world in a final crusade \u2026 against Semite-led Untermenschen.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n It wasn\u2019t just the shock of a reversal on the Azov Battalion, but the fact that it had happened so abruptly \u2014 Byrne estimates that it took no more than two weeks to exempt the group and allow praise of it once more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n She was aghast: \u201cOf course, this is going to exacerbate white supremacist violence,\u201d she recalls worrying. \u201cThis is going to make them look good. It\u2019s going to make it easier to spread propaganda. Ultimately, I was afraid that it was going to directly contribute to violence.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n In its comments to The Intercept, Meta reiterated its belief that the Azov unit has meaningfully reformed and no longer meets its standards for designation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Byrne recalled a similar frustration around Meta\u2019s blacklisting of factions fighting the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, but not the violent, repressive government itself. \u201c[Assad] was gassing his civilians, and there were a couple Syrians at Facebook who were like, \u2018Hey, why do we have this whole team called Dangerous Organizations and Individuals and they\u2019re only censoring the Syrian resistance?\u2019\u201d Byrne realized there was no satisfying answer: National governments were just generally off-limits.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Meta confirmed to The Intercept that its definition of terrorism doesn\u2019t apply to nation states, reflecting what it described as a legal and academic consensus that governments may legitimately use violence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At the start of her job, Byrne was under the impression right-wing extremism was a top priority for the company. \u201cBut every time I need resources for neo-Nazi stuff \u2026 nothing seemed to happen.\u201d The Azov exemption, by contrast, happened at lightning speed. Byrne recalls a similarly rapid engineering effort to tweak Meta\u2019s machine learning-based content scanning system that would have normally removed the bulk of Azov-friendly posts. Not everyone\u2019s algorithmic treatment is similarly prioritized: \u201cIt\u2019s infuriating that so many Palestinians are still being taken down for false-positive \u2018graphic violence\u2019 violations because it\u2019s obvious to me no one at Meta gives a shit,\u201d Byrne said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Meta pushed back on Byrne\u2019s broader objections to the Dangerous Organizations policy. \u201cThis former employee\u2019s claims do not match the reality of how our Dangerous Organizations policies actually work,\u201d Meta spokesperson Ryan Daniels said in a statement. \u201cThese policies are some of the most comprehensive in the industry, and designed to stop those who seek to promote violence, hate and terrorism on our platforms, while at the same time ensuring free expression. We have a team of hundreds of people from different backgrounds working on these issues every day \u2014 with expertise ranging from law enforcement and national security to human rights, counterterrorism and academic studies. Our Dangerous Organizations policies are not static, we update them to reflect evolving factors and changing threat landscapes, and we apply them equally around the world while also complying with our legal obligations.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n But it wasn\u2019t the Azov reversal that ended Byrne\u2019s counterterror career.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the wake of the attack on the Capitol, Meta had a problem: \u201cIt\u2019s tough to profile or pinpoint the type of person that would be inclined to participate in January 6, which is true of most terrorist groups,\u201d Byrne said. \u201cIt\u2019s an ideology, it lives in your mind.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n But what if the company could prevent the next recruit<\/a> for the Proud Boys, or Three Percenters, or even ISIS? \u201cThat was our task,\u201d Byrne said. \u201cFigure out where these groups are organizing, kind of nip it in the bud before they carry out any further real-world violence. We need to make sure they\u2019re not in groups together, not friending each other, and not connecting with like-minded people.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n She was assigned to work on Meta\u2019s Malicious Actor Framework, a system intended to span all its platforms and identify \u201cmalicious actors\u201d who might be prone to \u201cdangerous\u201d behavior using \u201csignals,\u201d Byrne said. The approach, she said, had been pioneered at Meta by the child safety team, which used automated alarms to alert the company when it seemed an adult might be attempting inappropriate contact with a child. That tactic had some success, but Byrne recalls it also mistakenly flagged people like coaches and teachers who had legitimate reason to interact with children.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Posting praise or admiring imagery of Osama bin Laden is relatively easy to catch and delete. But what about someone interested in his ideas? \u201cThe premise was that we need to target certain kinds of individuals who are likely to sympathize with terrorism,\u201d Byrne said. There was just one problem, as Byrne puts it today: \u201cWhat the fuck does it mean to be a sympathizer?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the field, this Obama-era framework of stopping radicalization before it takes root is known as Countering Violent Extremism, or CVE. It has been criticized<\/a> as both pseudoscientific and ineffective<\/a>, undermining the civil liberties of innocent people by placing them under suspicion for their own good. CVE programs generally \u201clack any scientific basis, are ineffective at reducing terrorism, and are overwhelmingly discriminatory in nature,\u201d according<\/a> to the Brennan Center for Justice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n https:\/\/api.piano.io\/checkout\/template\/cacheableShow?aid=hsZyoAWmIE&templateId=OTEXERHVRCE9&templateVariantId=OTVEIU52VT7IF&offerId=fakeOfferId&experienceId=EX3LBE28N473&iframeId=offer_b6839133b22532e4a86a-0&displayMode=inline&pianoIdUrl=https%3A%2F%2Fid.tinypass.com%2Fid%2F&widget=template&url=https%3A%2F%2Ftheintercept.com<\/p>\n\n\n\n Byrne had joined Meta at a time when the company was transitioning \u201cfrom content-based detection to profile-based detection,\u201dsaid Byrne. Screenshots of team presentations Byrne participated in show an interest in predicting dangerousness among users. One presentation expresses concern with Facebook\u2019s transition to encrypted messaging, which would prevent authorities (and Meta itself) from eavesdropping on chats: \u201cWe will need to move our detection\/enforcement\/investigation signals more upstream to surfaces we do have insight into (eg., user\u2019s behaviors on FB, past violations, social relationships, group metadata like description, image, title, etc) in order to flag areas of harm.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Meta specifically wanted the ability to detect and deter \u201crisky interactions\u201d between \u201cdangerous individuals\u201d or \u201clikely-malicious actors\u201d and their \u201cvictims\u201d vulnerable of radicalization \u2014 without being able to read the messages these users were exchanging. The company hoped to use this capability, according to these meeting materials, to stop \u201cmalicious actors distributing propaganda,\u201d for example. This would be accomplished using machine learning to recognize dangerous signals on someone\u2019s profile, according to these screenshots, like certain words in their profile or whether they\u2019d been members of a banned group.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Byrne said the plan was to incorporate this policy into a companywide framework, but she departed Meta too soon to know what ultimately came of this plan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Meta confirmed the existence of the malicious actor framework to The Intercept, explaining that it remains a work in progress, but disputed its predictive nature.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Byrne has no evidence that Meta was pursuing a system that would use overtly prejudiced criteria to determine who is a future threat, but feared that any predictive system would be based on thin evidence and unconsciously veer toward bias. Civil liberties scholars and counterterror experts have long warned that because terrorism is so extremely rare, any attempt to predict who will commit it is fatally flawed because there simply is not enough data. Such efforts often regress, wittingly or otherwise, into stereotypes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI brought it up in a couple meetings, including with my manager, but it wasn\u2019t taken that seriously,\u201d Byrne said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Byrne recalls discussion of predicting such radicalism risk based on things like who your friends are, what\u2019s on your profile, who sends you message, and the extent to which you and your network have previously violated Meta\u2019s speech rules. Given the fact enforcement of those rules has been shown to be biased along national or ethnic lines and plagued by technical errors, Byrne feared the worst for vulnerable users. \u201cIf you live in Palestine, all of your friends are Palestinians,\u201d Byrne said. \u201cThey\u2019re all getting flagged, and it\u2019s like a self-licking ice cream cone.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the spring of 2022,<\/ins> investigators drawn from Meta\u2019s internal Integrity, Investigations, and Intelligence team, known as i3, began analyzing the profiles of Facebook users whose profiles had run afoul of the Dangerous Organizations and Individuals policy, Byrne said. They were looking for shared traits that could be turned into general indicators of risk. \u201cAs someone who came from a professional research background, I can say it wasn\u2019t a good research methodology,\u201d Byrne said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Part of her objection was pedigree: People just barely removed from American government were able to determine what people could say on online, whether or not the internet users lived in the United States. Many of these investigators, according to Byrne\u2019s recollection and LinkedIn profiles of her former colleagues she shared with The Intercept, had arrived from positions at the Defense Department, FBI, and U.S. intelligence agencies, institutions not known for an unbiased approach to counterterror<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Over hours of interviews, Byrne never badmouthed any of her former colleagues nor blamed them individually. Her criticism of Meta is systemic, the sort of structural ailment she had hoped to change from within. \u201cIt was people that I personally liked and trusted, and I trusted their values,\u201d Byrne said of her former colleagues on Meta\u2019s in-house intelligence team.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Byrne feared implementing a system so deeply rooted in inference could endanger the users she\u2019d been hired to protect. She worried about systemic biases, such as \u201cthe fact that Arabic language just wasn\u2019t really represented in our data set.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n She worried about generalizing about one strain of violent extremism and applying it to drastically different cultures, contexts, and ideologies: \u201cWe\u2019re saying Hamas is the exact same thing as the KKK with absolutely no basis in logic or reason or history or research.\u201d Byrne encountered similar definitional headaches around \u201cmisinformation\u201d and \u201cdisinformation,\u201d which she says her team studied as potential sources of terror sympathy and wanted to incorporate into the Malicious Actor Framework. But like terrorism itself, Byrne found these terms simply too blunt to be effective. \u201cWe\u2019re taking some of the most complex, unrelated, geographically separated, just different fucking things, and we\u2019re literally using this word terrorism, or misinformation, or disinformation, to treat them as a binary.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Toward the end of her time at Meta, Byrne began to break down. The prospect of catching enemies of the state had energized her at first. <\/strong>Now she faced the grim, gradual realization that she wasn\u2019t accomplishing the things she hoped she would. Her work wasn\u2019t making Facebook safer, nor the people using it. Far from manning the barricades against extremism, Byrne quickly found herself just another millennial in a boring tech job.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But while planning the Malicious Actor Framework, these feelings of futility gave way to something worse: \u201cI\u2019m actually going to be an active participant in harm,\u201d she recalls thinking. The speech of people she\u2019d met in her studies abroad were exactly the kind her job might suppress. Finally, Byrne had decided \u201cit felt impossible to be a good actor within that system.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Spiraling mental health struggles resulted in a leave of absence in the spring of 2023 and months of partial hospitalization. Away from her job, grappling with the nature of her work, Byrne realized she couldn\u2019t go on. She returned at the end of the summer for a brief stretch before finally quitting on October 4. Her departure came just days before the world would be upended by events that would quickly implicate<\/a> her former employer<\/a> and highlight exactly why she fled from it. For Byrne, watching the Israeli military hailed by her country\u2019s leaders as it kills tens of thousands of civilians in the name of fighting terror exposes everything she believes wrong and fraudulent about the counterterrorism industry. Meta\u2019s Dangerous Organizations policy doesn\u2019t take lives, but she sees it as rooted in that same conceptual injustice. \u201cThe same racist, bullshit dynamics of \u2018terrorism\u2019 were not only dictating who the U.S. was allowed to kill, they were dictating what the world was allowed to see, who in the world was allowed to speak, and what the world was allowed to say,\u201d Byrne explained. \u201cAnd the system works exactly as the U.S. law intends it to \u2014 to silence resistance to its violence.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n In conversations, it seems most galling for Byrne to compare how malleable Meta\u2019s Dangerous Organizations policy was for Ukraine, and how draconian it has felt for those protesting the war in Gaza, or trying to document it happening around them. Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Meta not only moved swiftly to allow users to cheer on the Azov Battalion, but also loosened its rules around incitement, hate speech, and gory imagery so Ukrainian civilians could share images of the suffering around them and voice their fury against it. Byrne recalls seeing a video on Facebook of a Ukrainian woman giving an invading Russian soldier seeds, telling him to keep them in his pockets so they\u2019d flower from his corpse on the battlefield. Were it a Palestinian woman taunting to an Israeli soldier, Byrne said, \u201cthat would be taken down for terrorism so quickly.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Today, Byrne remains conflicted about the very concept of content moderation. On the one hand, she acknowledges that violent groups can and do organize via platforms like Facebook \u2014 the problem that brought her to the company in the first place. And there are ways she believes Meta could easily improve, given its financial resources: more and better human moderators, more policy drafted by teams equipped to meet the contours of the hundreds of different countries where people use Facebook and Instagram.<\/p>\n\n\n\n While Byrne and her colleagues were supposed to be preventing harm from occurring in the world, they often felt like they were a janitorial crew responding to bad press. \u201cAn article would come out, all my team would share it, and then it would be like \u2018Fix this thing\u2019 all day. I\u2019d be glued to the computer.\u201d Byrne recalls \u201cmy boss\u2019s boss or even Mark Zuckerberg just like searching things, and screenshotting them, and sending them to us, like \u2018Why is this still up?\u2019\u201d She remembers her team, contrary to conventional wisdom about Big Tech, \u201cexpressing gratitude when there would be [media] leaks sometimes, because we\u2019d all of a sudden get all of these resources and ability to change things.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Militant neo-Nazi organizations represent a real, violent threat to the public, and they and other violent groups can and do organize using online platforms like Facebook, she readily admits. Still, watching the way pro-Palestinian speech<\/a> has been restricted<\/a> by companies like Meta<\/a> since October 7, while glorifications of Israeli state violence flows unfettered, pushed her to speak out publicly about the company\u2019s censorship<\/a> apparatus. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In her life post-Meta, galvanized by the ongoing Israeli bombardment of Gaza, Byrne has become active in pro-Palestinian protest circles and outspoken in her criticism in her former employer\u2019s role in suppressing speech about the war. In February, she gave a presentation on Meta\u2019s censorship practices at the NOLA Freedom Forum, a New Orleans activist group, providing an insider\u2019s advice on how to avoid getting banned on Instagram.<\/p>\n\n\n\n She\u2019s still maddened by the establishment\u2019s circular logic of terrorism, which casts non-state actors as terrorists while condoning the same behaviors from governments. \u201cThe scales of acceptable casualties are astronomically different when we\u2019re talking about white, state-perpetrated violence versus brown and black non-state-perpetrated violence.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Unlike past Big Tech dissidents like Frances Haugen<\/a>, Byrne doesn\u2019t think her former employer can be reformed with tweaks to its algorithms or greater transparency. Rather, she fundamentally objects to an American company policing speech \u2014 even in the name of safety \u2014 for so much of the planet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So long as U.S. foreign policy and federal law brands certain acts of violence beyond the pale depending on politics and not harm \u2014 and so long as Meta believes itself beholden to those laws \u2014 Byrne believes the machine cannot be fixed. \u201cYou want military, Department of State, CIA people enforcing free speech? That is what is concerning about this.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sam Biddle<\/a>sam.biddle@theintercept.com<\/a>@sambiddle.99on Signal@sambiddle.com<\/a>on Bluesky@samfbiddle<\/a>on X<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" She Joined Facebook to Fight Terror. Now She\u2019s Convinced We Need to Fight Facebook. SUPPORT US Illustration: Vicky Leta for The Intercept Sam Biddle December 4 2024, 12:07 p.m. (TheIntercept.com) FOR TWO YEARS, Hannah Byrne was part of an invisible machine that determines what over 3 billion people around the… Continue reading ![\"\"\/](\"https:\/\/theintercept.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/select-Sam-1-bw-online-1523551829-180x180.jpg\")
<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\nGood Guys and Bad Guys<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Facebook Allows Praise of Neo-Nazi Ukrainian Battalion If It Fights Russian Invasion<\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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Malicious Actors<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Private Policy, Public Relations<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Read Our Complete CoverageIsrael\u2019s War on Gaza<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\nCONTACT THE AUTHOR:<\/a><\/h2>\n\n\n\n