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Decades of federal investigations looked into Manchin’s inner circle and business associates.
Byrd was also the progenitor of the eponymous Byrd rule, which placed expansive limits on what can be included in the budget reconciliation process that President Joe Biden is now attempting to use to pass his critical policy objectives. Joe Manchin, then the governor of West Virginia, was on the cusp of rising to fill Byrd’s seat in the upper chamber, while also staring down the potential collapse of everything he’d built over his decadeslong career in politics. As Manchin launched his Senate campaign, a federal investigation was bearing down on his administration and its inner circle.
“It’s one of those things, you look at the timing, and you question the timing of how all this would have happened,” Manchin told Politico at the time. “But it is what it is, and I think the people know better.
Weeks after Byrd’s death, federal subpoenas were sent to agencies throughout Manchin’s administration. Though the Manchin governor’s office wasn’t directly subpoenaed, investigators were looking into multiple people and agencies with a web of ties to Manchin, including Manchin’s former chief of staff and confidante, Larry Puccio, then the head of the state Democratic party. In 2006, as Manchin’s chief of staff, Puccio had also met with Mon Power lobbyists and advocated for them to petition for a rate increase for West Virginians’ electricity that kept Manchin’s company’s biggest coal customer afloat, the details of which have not been previously reported.
The full purview of the investigation was never made clear. In addition to a subpoena to the Department of Transportation’s Division of Highways investigating land seized through eminent domain, the government sought campaign finance records from the secretary of state’s office on Manchin’s 1996 gubernatorial bid and from the department of administration’s aviation division.
Sam Runyon, a spokesperson for Joe Manchin, told The Intercept, “Senator Manchin has devoted most of his adult life to public service. At every stage he has been compliant with financial and ethical standards. He has never been the subject of a federal investigation.”
The state government spent $60,000 to hire an independent investigator to respond to the federal subpoenas, which a deputy assistant general said was necessary for maintaining a totally hands-off approach, given the governor’s Senate campaign. Manchin had two connections to the family of the U.S. attorney overseeing the probe. The U.S. attorney for the southern district of West Virginia at the time of the probe was Boothe Goodwin, nephew of Manchin’s Secretary of Culture and Arts Kay Goodwin. Boothe Goodwin was also the cousin of Carte Goodwin, Manchin’s former legal counsel and the man he would appoint as interim senator, before filling the seat himself when Carte declined to run in the special election four months later.
Ultimately, only one person was charged with tax evasion and mail fraud, to the disbelief of the judge hearing the case. Manchin won election to the Senate by over 50,000 votes, narrowly retaining Democratic control of the Senate. Years later, Boothe Goodwin would go on to run a super PAC aiding Manchin’s reelection.
For more than 20 years, Manchin stayed a step ahead of federal investigations as they closed in around his inner circle. A review of statehouse investigation reports, public court records, and sealed documents obtained by The Intercept reveals a decadeslong history of investigations into employees, contractors, and business associates of Manchin. These incidents involve investigations into tax evasion, grand larceny, campaign finance violations, and an investigation by federal agencies including the FBI and IRS into a wide range of alleged criminal activity centered around Manchin’s governor’s office.
“We had to change a lot of things about the way we do business in West Virginia, by making the bidding process more open, transparent, getting financial advisers,” Manchin told Politico in 2010. “So there’s a lot of people’s whose feathers were rubbed wrong, and I think there might be some of that coming back to roost.”
In both the 2010s and the 1990s, federal investigations involving confidential informants petered out, with only low-level players facing prosecution, sentencing, and jail time. The review of Manchin’s career reveals a tangled political and professional journey that has led the senior senator to the summit of global power, making him the man who holds in his hands the fate of the fossil fuel industry, and in turn, the fate of the planet.
2010 Federal Investigation
The 2010 investigation hinged on an FBI informant who had performed no-bid contracting work on the governor’s mansion and had a history of “fraudulent behavior,” according to prosecutors. The investigation seems to have originated in illegal contracts for window treatments but soon extended far beyond that. The Charleston Gazette-Mail reported how extensive the investigation was at the time: “The probe included federal subpoenas issued last summer to the state Division of Highways and reportedly the state Department of Administration, including flight records of state aircraft that are used primarily by the Governor’s Office. Campaign finance records from Manchin’s unsuccessful 1996 run for governor also were subpoenaed by a federal grand jury.”
Earlier in 2010, Manchin had ridden on Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship’s private jet, days after the Upper Big Branch mine disaster which took the lives of 29 miners in a Massey-owned mine. At the time of the disaster, a spokesperson for Manchin said that a state aircraft wasn’t available and that Blankenship would be reimbursed for the cost of the flight.
Among the schemes that had caught the eye of federal investigators involved a major $150 million highway project running through Manchin country: the governor’s home base of Fairmont, West Virginia. Fairmont is in the heart of Manchin’s coal empire, one town over from Farmington where his father served as mayor. Manchin and his family own considerable property in Fairmont, and his family company Enersystems continues to lease coal reserves outside of the city limits. Wrapped up in the investigation was the real estate firm of Larry Puccio, the longtime Manchin aide and confidante.
Puccio was Manchin’s chief of staff before resigning in 2010 and registering as a lobbyist one week later, prompting state legislators to create a one-year period before former political officials can transfer to lobbying in the private sector. He then went on to become the West Virginia Democratic party boss before abandoning that post last year to support Republican Gov. Jim Justice’s candidacy. In 2017, both Puccio and a spokesperson for Manchin made contradictory statements to the press about their respective connections to a firm named in a $14.6 million hotel bankruptcy suit. Puccio is also a co-owner of the Wonder Bar Steakhouse in Clarksburg, which shares a name with the turreted steakhouse used as a meeting place by Al Capone and his affiliates. Puccio did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Where highways run, corruption can follow. Both the FBI and IRS were investigating Puccio’s firm for its role in appraising property that would then be seized through eminent domain to make way for the new construction, the Gazette-Mail reported at the time. Puccio’s firm, which he said at the time was in a blind trust, was responsible for appraising the land cut through the 1.3-mile project at $150 million.
Puccio’s firm was also the appraiser for a $22 million armory project in Fairmont, which was another subject of investigation, according to the Gazette-Mail. The main contractor for that project was Omni Associates, an architectural firm previously located in the Manchin Professional Building in Fairmont where Manchin’s family coal company, Enersystems, was also headquartered and where Manchin’s cousin Tim operated a law firm. The two senior principals of Omni have donated thousands to Manchin since 2000.
Puccio had also played a role, which has not been previously reported, in the scheme to charge West Virginians more for electricity in order to keep Enersystems’ biggest customer viable. For years, the main buyer of coal from Enersystems was the Grant Town Power Plant, which then sold energy to Mon Power, a major electric company in West Virginia. The regulated rate it passed on to consumers, $27.25 per megawatt, kept down the price it could pay Manchin’s company and threatened the economic viability of the plant. Rather than switch to a more economically efficient energy source, Manchin simply pushed to force ratepayers to pay more.
In 2006, according to a source familiar with the rate change, Puccio, then serving as Manchin’s chief of staff, was instructed by Manchin to meet with Mon Power lobbyists so that they would petition the public service commission to increase the Grant Town plant’s megawatt rate to $34.25, soliciting an additional $4.5 million dollars per year from ratepayers and bailing out the main buyer of Enersystems coal. As Sludge reported earlier this month, Puccio has been registered as a lobbyist since 2017 for the parent company of Mon Power.
In 2010, the investigation went away. After the state spent over $60,000 in legal fees responding to subpoenas, only one person was charged with a crime: Clark Diehl, the contractor who had been an informant for federal agencies for over three years. He ultimately pleaded guilty to altering bid contracts to redecorate the governor’s office, Puccio’s office, and other rooms in the governor’s mansion.
Diehl’s sentencing was pushed off until after the special election for the Senate seat that Manchin now holds, with federal prosecutors securing extended time for sentencing under the rationale that Diehl would be cooperating in a broader case. Meanwhile, the state attorney general’s office repeatedly blocked open records requests regarding the case. News media was also shut out from initial hearings. Some local pundits later speculated that the Obama Department of Justice may have intervened to bolster his chances of maintaining a majority in the Senate.
Many of the documents from Diehl’s trial are now sealed, but as the Gazette-Mail reported in 2011, the judge hearing the case couldn’t understand why more charges were not brought against two other employees. Diehl had recorded over 100 conversations with state employees both through the use of a wire and by phone, leveled accusations of public corruption, and served as an informant for years, striking a plea deal to cooperate in a far-reaching dragnet. “You’re not telling me much,” the judge told the prosecution at the time of sentencing. Prosecutors told the judge that ultimately they couldn’t use Diehl’s work for other targets “in light of his extensive fraudulent activity prior to his cooperation” and that only a few of the recordings “proved of limited usefulness, and overall the recordings failed to corroborate Mr. Diehl’s allegations of public corruption.”
Diehl did not respond to multiple phone calls from The Intercept.
In a court filing, Diehl’s lawyer highlighted the lack of broader prosecutions, writing: “Attorneys General changed, United States Attorneys changed, Governors and Senators changed, and the United States’ prosecution of Alaska Senator Ted Stevens imploded.”
Manchin’s Kennedy Ambitions
In 1960, West Virginia Republicans were a nonexistent species, followed close behind West Virginian Catholics. In February of that year, Senator John F. Kennedy announced he’d compete in the state’s primary, hoping to bury once and for all the counterargument that the American people would never elect a Catholic president. There was no better place to prove that than West Virginia.
To get him there, he relied on A. James Manchin, who became the Kennedy point man in West Virginia, making introductions around the state. A. James was first elected to the West Virginia House of Delegates at the age of 21 after befriending Arch A. Moore Jr., the descendent of a powerful West Virginian political family, the future governor of West Virginia, and the father of Shelley Moore Capito, current junior U.S. senator for West Virginia. (Moore would be convicted of five felonies including mail fraud, tax fraud, extortion, and obstruction of justice stemming from his time as governor in the mid-1980s.)
James Manchin’s brother and Joe Manchin’s father, who went by John Manchin, served as the mayor of Farmington and dreamed of launching a dynasty like the one the Kennedy family would produce — a dream he passed on to his son.
“My hands were dirty and greasy, but my mother insisted that I wipe them clean and come upstairs to meet a few people,” Joe Manchin III recalled years later. “As I climbed the steps, I smelled my grandmother, Mama Kay’s, spaghetti. Everyone had gathered at the table for dinner and an exciting discussion about the political race ramping up in West Virginia. That was the day I shook hands with the Kennedys.”
Kennedy won the West Virginia primary and locked in the national nomination. His ascension was a victory for Uncle A. James Manchin, who was rewarded with an appointment as state director for the Farmers Home Administration. He then went on to hold the secretary of state’s office and later the state treasurer’s office (where he was subsequently impeached for bad investments that cost West Virginia hundreds of millions, resigning before his trial). Manchin III climbed past him from state senator to secretary of state, governor, then U.S. senator.
But the parables of the Manchins and the Kennedys are not one and the same. The Kennedys — through patriarch Joseph Kennedy — first amassed a fortune through rank corruption and organized crime, then used that fortune to fund a political empire. The Manchins inverted this trajectory: first winning political power and then using it to build a financial fortune. While Manchin continues to serve in the Senate, he has kept one foot in the private sector through his coal empire, and both of his children used their connections not to win office but to grow wildly rich.
Manchin’s daughter Heather Bresch received a $30 million golden parachute after finishing her tenure as CEO of Mylan and overseeing the sale of the pharmaceuticals company to Pfizer — a deal that led to the devastating closure of the company’s Morgantown plant. His wife Gayle Manchin now heads the Appalachian Regional Commission, which JFK created in 1965. Years before heading ARC, Gayle served as the head of the National Association of State Boards of Education, where she used her position to require schools to buy the EpiPens her daughter’s company produced.
And Joe Manchin IV is doing well too, running the multimillion-dollar family coal empire that Manchin the senator reminds voters is kept in a blind trust. Meanwhile, Manchin has objected to a wide swath of the Biden agenda, arguing it could produce an “entitlement mentality” and insisting that any tax credit parents with children get come along with work requirements.
1992 Coal Theft Investigation
Nearly two decades before the 2010 investigation, Manchin’s family company was implicated in another far-reaching federal investigation. In 1992, federal investigators uncovered a scheme at Peabody Coal’s Federal No. 2 mine in West Virginia. Trucks moving coal out of the mine were being deleted from the mine’s daily weight logs by Michael Toth, the mine supervisor, and a security guard, Jeff Isiminger. Over the course of eight months, the federal case alleged, 29,000 tons of coal were smuggled out of the mine, worth more than $600,000. The coal was then sold for profit by James Petitte of J & P Coal and James Frey of Frey Lumber.
When the case went to trial, however, prosecutors left out one critical business. A sealed affidavit obtained by The Intercept describing the IRS investigation reveals that Joe Manchin’s family company, Enersystems, was also investigated for coal theft. The affidavit was signed by a magistrate judge and seeks to establish probable cause for a search warrant. According to the affidavit, Enersystems trucks were also leaving the mine uncounted; a confidential informant told IRS special agent Richard Warner that “he deleted trucks for ‘Petitte’ and for Enersystems from Daily Reports.”
Warner also recommended that a warrant be served on Enersystems, though it is unknown whether a warrant was carried out. “I have probable cause to believe and do believe that Enersystems Inc., Mon River Docks, Jolaco, Rosedale Docks, Petitte and others, both known and unknown to me, have been involved in interstate transportation of stolen property, mail fraud, racketeering and engaging in transactions in such a way as to defraud the United States,” wrote Warner. Petitte and Frey; Isiminger, the security guard; and a loader named Hans Mohr pleaded guilty; Toth, the mine supervisor, was convicted on 18 counts, including conspiracy, wire fraud, mail fraud, interstate transport of stolen property, money laundering, and tampering with a witness. Petitte and Toth are now deceased, and attempts to reach Isiminger and Frey by phone were unsuccessful.
Hans Mohr, when asked why nobody involved with Enersystems was charged, told The Intercept, “Because they had connections and I didn’t” before declining to speak further.
Enersystems, which has been owned by the Manchin family for over three decades — Manchin launched it while serving in the state Senate — purchases low-quality waste coal from mines and resells it to power plants as fuel. In the affidavit, workers also alleged that they had seen an ongoing scheme to crush coal into a size that would be recorded as waste, and could then be hauled for free and sold at a profit by brokers.
During one surveillance period conducted by the West Virginia state police, according to the affidavit, all unreported coal leaving the Peabody mine arrived at Jolaco docks, a company owned by Joseph Laurita Jr. and James L. Laurita. James Laurita currently serves as an officer for LP Minerals LLC, which operates, among others, the Humphrey No. 7 mine site — which is the largest supplier of coal to Manchin’s company Enersystems. Neither Laurita was charged as part of the investigation. In 2018 though, Laurita was indicted on charges of campaign finance violations, after allegedly providing employees of his firm with cash bonuses and directing them and their spouses to donate hundreds of thousands of dollars to Manchin and other West Virginia politicians. The case ended in a mistrial. (Acting U.S. Attorney Randolph J. Bernard told The Intercept that “the most prudent course of action and the most efficient use of government resources was not to seek a retrial.”)
Despite two purchasers of stolen coal being indicted and pleading guilty, Enersystems employees remain absent from news coverage of the investigation. The sealed nature of the case makes the way Enersystems employees entirely avoided prosecution difficult to ascertain, and multiple requests for comment to Enersystems were not returned.
After serving as one of two prosecutors in the stolen coal case, former U.S. Attorney William Wilmoth went on to serve as legal counsel for American Bituminous Power Partners, the owner of the Grant Town Power Plant that became the largest purchaser of Enersystems coal.
The Buffalo Creek flows past Manchin’s childhood home in Farmington before entering Barrackville to the east, where a mine leased by one of Manchin’s companies spews runoff violating EPA clean water standards. It rounds a bend through Fairmont where Manchin first solidified his political base, then mixes with the Monongahela River, where a barge worker fell to his death while moving coal from a mine that supplied Enersystems. Beyond Fairmont, the Monongahela’s tributaries stretch eastward, snaking their way toward Washington, D.C.
The waterways that trace Manchin’s political career and carry the toxic sediment his ascension accrued also threaten to deluge West Virginia — surpassed by no other state in terms of its exposure to flood damage, the New York Times reported earlier this week — as rising temperatures threaten to overwhelm the land that Manchin grew up on, then turned around to poison.
In the nation’s capital, Manchin continues to use his political power to block legislation that could reverse the planet’s warming trend. He has quashed Democrats’ hopes of incentivizing the drawdown of fossil fuels and slashed provisions to empower a green energy transition, all while receiving more donations from the oil, coal, and natural gas industries than any other senator in the last election cycle.
Despite his starry-eyed meeting with the Kennedys as a boy, today Manchin embodies the opposite of the values he most admired in Kennedy. “In a time of indifference,” Manchin wrote of Kennedy’s presidency, “he reawakened this nation to the finest meaning of citizenship — placing public service ahead of private interest.”
People tour an exhibit at the Newseum dedicated to John F. Kennedy on November 22, 2013, in Washington, D.C. (photo: Mark Wilson/Getty Images)
The memo doesn’t actually go into detail on how the pandemic affected the review process, only noting that the national archivist had requested the delay in the release of the documents because the pandemic “has had a significant impact on the agencies” reviewing the redactions in the document. “The Archivist has also noted that ‘making these decisions is a matter that requires a professional, scholarly, and orderly process; not decisions or releases made in haste,’” Biden writes in the memo, saying he agreed with the recommendation that more time was needed.
In addition to authorizing the delay in the release of the documents, the memo also details that Biden has called on the National Archives to put forward a plan to digitize the more than 250,000 records that have already been released regarding Kennedy’s assassination. Although more than 90 percent of records having to do with the assassination have been publicly released, many are only available to people willing to travel to the National Archives site in Maryland.
The John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act dating back to 1992 had said all files should be publicly released by October 2017. But it allowed for delay when there were concerns over national security. Then-President Donald Trump authorized the release of almost 20,000 documents but delayed the disclosure of other files, setting the deadline of Oct. 26, 2021.
People who have been eagerly awaiting the documents were none too happy with the new delay. Jefferson Morley, who edits JFKFacts.org, criticized the move, likening the White House explanation for the delay as the “COVID dog ate my homework” excuse. “Let’s not make hasty decisions? After 29 years of stonewalling, they don’t want to make a hasty decision,” Morley told the Washington Post. “They are saying very clearly they do not intend to obey the law … it’s a ruse.”
An opened gate at the US-Mexico border wall in Cameron county, Texas on 19 October 2021. (photo: Reginald Mathalone/NurPhoto/REX/Shutterstock)
Revealed: documents released after six years of legal tussles uncover over 160 cases of misconduct and abuse
A stash of redacted documents released to the human rights group after six years of legal tussles uncover more than 160 cases of misconduct and abuse by leading government agencies, notably Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and US Border Patrol. The papers record events between 2016 and 2021 that range from child sexual assault to enforced hunger, threats of rape and brutal detention conditions.
Some of the incidents involve alleged criminal activity by federal agents.
Human Rights Watch said that the documents “paint a picture of DHS as an agency that appears to have normalized shocking abuses at the US border. The US should take urgent and sustained action to stop such abuses”.
The newly released documents record a case of alleged child sexual abuse reported by a supervisor in the San Francisco asylum office. An asylum officer interviewed “a young child who was sexually molested by someone we believe to be a CBP or Border Patrol Officer … The young girl was forced to undress and touched inappropriately by a guard wearing green”.
The Border Patrol uniform is green.
Another report recounts an incident in 2018 when a male asylum seeker was detained and taken to a detention center in San Ysidro, California. An officer told the man that “if he gave him sex, he would be set free”, and when the detainee refused “the officer swore at him in English and said that he would be locked up as punishment”.
Federal agents operating along the Mexican border have long been accused of misconduct and mistreatment of the migrants and asylum seekers attempting to enter the US. Conditions in detention centers can be harsh and detainees have frequently complained that they are kept so cold the holding pens are described as “hieleras”, or ice boxes.
A Honduran asylum seeker reported conditions in the McAllen facility in 2019: “I was there for 10 days sitting, I couldn’t move because it was 67 of us in that cell. We said we needed toilet paper and water and … we reported the animals, the scorpions in there. There were scorpions, ants, ticks, fleas and they would tell us that it was fine, it was because of our own stink of being there 45 days.”
Concerns about inappropriate behaviour by officers at the border made international headlines again in September when Border Patrol agents on horseback bearing what looked like whips were photographed grabbing at Haitian migrants.
The Human Rights Watch documents point to numerous ways in which asylum seekers appear to have had their right to due process violated. One of the records released in the freedom of information suit appears to relate to a federal inquiry into CBP and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) violations of correct procedure.
The inquiry found 27 possible cases where asylum seekers were blocked from filing complaints or forced to sign papers they could not understand.
One Honduran man applying for asylum was told by a Border Patrol agent that unless he signed paperwork rescinding his application “he was going to be sent to a jail where they were going to rape him”.
Mogadishu's streets bear the scars of war, many of them decades old. (photo: Tyler Hicks/NYT)
The hunt for an elusive Somali militant illustrates why Al Shabab, despite a decade of American covert action, are at their strongest in years.
The vehicles halted at a seaside village where American and Somali paramilitaries poured out, storming a house and killing several militants, Somali officials said. But one man escaped, sprinted to an explosives-filled vehicle primed for a suicide bombing, and hit the detonator.
The blast last November killed three Somalis and grievously wounded an American: Michael Goodboe, 54, a C.I.A. paramilitary specialist and former Navy SEAL, who was airlifted to a U.S. military hospital in Germany. He died 17 days later.
Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg. (photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Internal documents suggest Facebook has long known its algorithms and recommendation systems push some users to extremes.
Though Smith had never expressed interest in conspiracy theories, in just two days Facebook was recommending she join groups dedicated to QAnon, a sprawling and baseless conspiracy theory and movement that claimed Trump was secretly saving the world from a cabal of pedophiles and Satanists.
Smith didn’t follow the recommended QAnon groups, but whatever algorithm Facebook was using to determine how she should engage with the platform pushed ahead just the same. Within one week, Smith’s feed was full of groups and pages that had violated Facebook’s own rules, including those against hate speech and disinformation.
Smith wasn’t a real person. A researcher employed by Facebook invented the account, along with those of other fictitious “test users” in 2019 and 2020, as part of an experiment in studying the platform’s role in misinforming and polarizing users through its recommendations systems.
That researcher said Smith’s Facebook experience was “a barrage of extreme, conspiratorial, and graphic content.”
The body of research consistently found Facebook pushed some users into “rabbit holes,” increasingly narrow echo chambers where violent conspiracy theories thrived. People radicalized through these rabbit holes make up a small slice of total users, but at Facebook’s scale, that can mean millions of individuals.
The findings, communicated in a report titled “Carol’s Journey to QAnon,” were among thousands of pages of documents included in disclosures made to the Securities and Exchange Commission and provided to Congress in redacted form by legal counsel for Frances Haugen, who worked as a Facebook product manager until May. Haugen is now asserting whistleblower status and has filed several specific complaints that Facebook puts profit over public safety. Earlier this month, she testified about her claims before a Senate subcommittee.
Versions of the disclosures — which redacted the names of researchers, including the author of “Carol’s Journey to QAnon” — were shared digitally and reviewed by a consortium of news organizations, including NBC News. The Wall Street Journal published a series of reports based on many of the documents last month.
“While this was a study of one hypothetical user, it is a perfect example of research the company does to improve our systems and helped inform our decision to remove QAnon from the platform,” a Facebook spokesperson said in a response to emailed questions.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has broadly denied Haugen’s claims, defending his company’s “industry-leading research program” and its commitment to “identify important issues and work on them.” The documents released by Haugen partly support those claims, but they also highlight the frustrations of some of the employees engaged in that research.
Among Haugen’s disclosures are research, reports and internal posts that suggest Facebook has long known its algorithms and recommendation systems push some users to extremes. And while some managers and executives ignored the internal warnings, anti-vaccine groups, conspiracy theory movements and disinformation agents took advantage of their permissiveness, threatening public health, personal safety and democracy at large.
“These documents effectively confirm what outside researchers were saying for years prior, which was often dismissed by Facebook,” said Renée DiResta, technical research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory and one of the earliest harbingers of the risks of Facebook’s recommendation algorithms.
Facebook’s own research shows how easily a relatively small group of users has been able to hijack the platform, and for DiResta, it settles any remaining question about Facebook’s role in the growth of conspiracy networks.
“Facebook literally helped facilitate a cult,” she said.
For years, company researchers had been running experiments like Carol Smith’s to gauge the platform’s hand in radicalizing users, according to the documents seen by NBC News.
This internal work repeatedly found that recommendation tools pushed users into extremist groups, findings that helped inform policy changes and tweaks to recommendations and news feed rankings. Those rankings are a tentacled, ever-evolving system widely known as “the algorithm” that pushes content to users. But the research at that time stopped well short of inspiring any movement to change the groups and pages themselves.
That reluctance was indicative of “a pattern at Facebook,” Haugen told reporters this month. “They want the shortest path between their current policies and any action.”
“There is great hesitancy to proactively solve problems,” Haugen added.
A Facebook spokesperson disputed that the research had not pushed the company to act and pointed to changes to groups announced in March.
While QAnon followers committed real-world violence in 2019 and 2020, groups and pages related to the conspiracy theory skyrocketed, according to internal documents. The documents also show how teams inside Facebook took concrete steps to understand and address those issues — some of which employees saw as too little, too late.
By summer 2020, Facebook was hosting thousands of private QAnon groups and pages, with millions of members and followers, according to an unreleased internal investigation.
A year after the FBI designated QAnon as a potential domestic terrorist threat in the wake of standoffs, planned kidnappings, harassment campaigns and shootings, Facebook labeled QAnon a “Violence Inciting Conspiracy Network” and banned it from the platform, along with militias and other violent social movements. A small team working across several of Facebook’s departments found its platforms had hosted hundreds of ads on Facebook and Instagram worth thousands of dollars and millions of views, “praising, supporting, or representing” the conspiracy theory.
The Facebook spokesperson said in an email that the company has “taken a more aggressive approach in how we reduce content that is likely to violate our policies, in addition to not recommending Groups, Pages or people that regularly post content that is likely to violate our policies.”
For many employees inside Facebook, the enforcement came too late, according to posts left on Workplace, the company’s internal message board.
“We’ve known for over a year now that our recommendation systems can very quickly lead users down the path to conspiracy theories and groups,” one integrity researcher, whose name had been redacted, wrote in a post announcing she was leaving the company. “This fringe group has grown to national prominence, with QAnon congressional candidates and QAnon hashtags and groups trending in the mainstream. We were willing to act only * after * things had spiraled into a dire state.”
While Facebook’s ban initially appeared effective, a problem remained: The removal of groups and pages didn’t wipe out QAnon’s most extreme followers, who continued to organize on the platform.
“There was enough evidence to raise red flags in the expert community that Facebook and other platforms failed to address QAnon’s violent extremist dimension,” said Marc-André Argentino, a research fellow at King’s College London’s International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation, who has extensively studied QAnon.
Believers simply rebranded as anti-child-trafficking groups or migrated to other communities, including those around the anti-vaccine movement.
It was a natural fit. Researchers inside Facebook studying the platform’s niche communities found violent conspiratorial beliefs to be connected to Covid-19 vaccine hesitancy. In one study, researchers found QAnon community members were also highly concentrated in anti-vaccine communities. Anti-vaccine influencers had similarly embraced the opportunity of the pandemic and used Facebook’s features like groups and livestreaming to grow their movements.
“We do not know if QAnon created the preconditions for vaccine hesitancy beliefs,” researchers wrote. “It may not matter either way. We should be concerned about people affected by both problems.”
QAnon believers also jumped to groups promoting former President Donald Trump’s false claim that the 2020 election was stolen, groups that trafficked in a hodgepodge of baseless conspiracy theories alleging voters, Democrats and election officials were somehow cheating Trump out of a second term. This new coalition, largely organized on Facebook, ultimately stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, according to a report included in the document trove and first reported by BuzzFeed News in April.
These conspiracy groups had become the fastest-growing groups on Facebook, according to the report, but Facebook wasn’t able to control their “meteoric growth,” the researchers wrote, “because we were looking at each entity individually, rather than as a cohesive movement.” A Facebook spokesperson told BuzzFeed News it took many steps to limit election misinformation but that it was unable to catch everything.
Facebook’s enforcement was “piecemeal,” the team of researchers wrote, noting, “we’re building tools and protocols and having policy discussions to help us do this better next time.”
The attack on the Capitol invited harsh self-reflection from employees.
One team invoked the lessons learned during QAnon’s moment to warn about permissiveness with anti-vaccine groups and content, which researchers found comprised up to half of all vaccine content impressions on the platform.
“In rapidly-developing situations, we’ve often taken minimal action initially due to a combination of policy and product limitations making it extremely challenging to design, get approval for, and roll out new interventions quickly,” the report said. QAnon was offered as an example of a time when Facebook was “prompted by societal outcry at the resulting harms to implement entity takedowns” for a crisis on which “we initially took limited or no action.”
The effort to overturn the election also invigorated efforts to clean up the platform in a more proactive way.
Facebook’s “Dangerous Content” team formed a working group in early 2021 to figure out ways to deal with the kind of users who had been a challenge for Facebook: communities including QAnon, Covid-denialists and the misogynist incel movement that weren’t obvious hate or terrorism groups but that, by their nature, posed a risk to the safety of individuals and societies.
The focus wasn’t to eradicate them, but to curb the growth of these newly branded “harmful topic communities,” with the same algorithmic tools that had allowed them to grow out of control.
“We know how to detect and remove harmful content, adversarial actors, and malicious coordinated networks, but we have yet to understand the added harms associated with the formation of harmful communities, as well as how to deal with them,” the team wrote in a 2021 report.
In a February report, they got creative. An integrity team detailed an internal system meant to measure and protect users against societal harms including radicalization, polarization and discrimination that its own recommendation systems had helped cause. Building on a previous research effort dubbed “Project Rabbithole,” the new program was dubbed “Drebbel.” Cornelis Drebbel was a 17th-century Dutch engineer known for inventing the first navigable submarine and the first thermostat.
The Drebbel group was tasked with discovering and ultimately stopping the paths that moved users toward harmful content on Facebook and Instagram, including in anti-vaccine and QAnon groups.
A post from the Drebbel team praised the earlier research on test users. “We believe Drebbel will be able to scale this up significantly,” they wrote.
“Group joins can be an important signal and pathway for people going towards harmful and disruptive communities,” the group stated in a post to Workplace, Facebook’s internal message board. “Disrupting this path can prevent further harm.”
The Drebbel group features prominently in Facebook’s “Deamplification Roadmap,” a multistep plan published on the company Workplace on Jan. 6 that includes a complete audit of recommendation algorithms.
In March, the Drebbel group posted about its progress via a study and suggested a way forward. If researchers could systematically identify the “gateway groups,” those that fed into anti-vaccination and QAnon communities, they wrote, maybe Facebook could put up roadblocks to keep people from falling through the rabbit hole.
The Drebbel “Gateway Groups” study looked back at a collection of QAnon and anti-vaccine groups that had been removed for violating policies around misinformation and violence and incitement. It used the membership of these purged groups to study how users had been pulled in. Drebbel identified 5,931 QAnon groups with 2.2 million total members, half of which joined through so-called gateway groups. For 913 anti-vaccination groups with 1.7 million members, the study identified 1 million had joined via gateway groups. (Facebook has said it recognizes the need to do more.)
Facebook integrity employees warned in an earlier report that anti-vaccine groups could become more extreme.
“Expect to see a bridge between online and offline world,” the report said. “We might see motivated users create sub-communities with other highly motivated users to plan action to stop vaccination.”
A separate cross-department group reported this year that vaccine hesitancy in the U.S. “closely resembled” QAnon and Stop the Steal movements, “primarily driven by authentic actors and community building.”
“We found, like many problems at FB,” the team wrote, “that this is a head-heavy problem with a relatively few number of actors creating a large percentage of the content and growth.”
The Facebook spokesperson said the company had “focused on outcomes” in relation to Covid-19 and that it had seen vaccine hesitancy decline by 50 percent, according to a survey it conducted with Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Maryland.
Whether Facebook’s newest integrity initiatives will be able to stop the next dangerous conspiracy theory movement or the violent organization of existing movements remains to be seen. But their policy recommendations may carry more weight now that the violence on Jan. 6 laid bare the outsize influence and dangers of even the smallest extremist communities and the misinformation that fuels them.
“The power of community, when based on harmful topics or ideologies, potentially poses a greater threat to our users than any single piece of content, adversarial actor, or malicious network,” a 2021 report concluded.
The Facebook spokesperson said the recommendations in the “Deamplification Roadmap” are on track: “This is important work and we have a long track record of using our research to inform changes to our apps,” the spokesperson wrote. “Drebbel is consistent with this approach, and its research helped inform our decision this year to permanently stop recommending civic, political or news Groups on our platforms. We are proud of this work and we expect it to continue to inform product and policy decisions going forward.”
South Koren K-Pop band BTS. (photo: BTS Promo)
Kim Jong Un: K-Pop Is a ‘Vicious Cancer’ That Merits Work Camp, Execution
Lyrics BTS, Dynamite.
'Cause I, I, I'm in the stars tonight
So watch me bring the fire and set the night alight
Shoes on, get up in the morn'
Cup of milk, let's rock and roll
King Kong, kick the drum
Rolling on like a Rolling Stone
Sing song when I'm walkin' home
Jump up to the top, LeBron
Ding-dong, call me on my phone
Ice tea and a game of ping pong
This is gettin' heavy, can you hear the bass boom? I'm ready (Woo-hoo)
Life is sweet as honey, yeah, this beat cha-ching like money, huh
Disco overload, I'm into that, I'm good to go
I'm diamond, you know I glow up
Hey, so let's go
'Cause I, I, I'm in the stars tonight
So watch me bring the fire and set the night alight (Hey)
Shinin' through the city with a little funk and soul
So I'ma light it up like dynamite, woah-oh-oh
Bring a friend, join the crowd, whoever wanna come along
Word up, talk the talk, just move like we off the wall
Day or night, the sky's alight, so we dance to the break of dawn (Hey)
Ladies and gentlemen, I got the medicine so you should keep ya eyes on the ball
Huh, this is gettin' heavy, can you hear the bass boom? I'm ready (Woo-hoo)
Life is sweet as honey, yeah, this beat cha-ching like money, huh
Disco overload, I'm into that, I'm good to go
I'm diamond, you know I glow up
Let's go
'Cause I, I, I'm in the stars tonight
So watch me bring the fire and set the night alight (Hey)
Shinin' through the city with a little funk and soul
So I'ma light it up like dynamite, woah-oh-oh
Dyn-na-na-na, na-na-na-na-na, na-na-na, life is dynamite
Dyn-na-na-na, na-na-na-na-na, na-na-na, life is dynamite
Shinin' through the city with a little funk and soul
So I'ma light it up like dynamite, woah-oh-oh
Dyn-na-na-na, na-na, na-na, ayy
Dyn-na-na-na, na-na, na-na, ayy
Dyn-na-na-na, na-na, na-na, ayy
Light it up like dynamite
Dyn-na-na-na, na-na, na-na, ayy
Dyn-na-na-na, na-na, na-na, ayy
Dyn-na-na-na, na-na, na-na, ayy
Light it up like dynamite
Najin and her daughter Fatou, the last two northern white rhino females, graze near their enclosure at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Laikipia National Park. (photo: Reuters)
Najin, 32, is the mother of Fatu who is now the only donor left in the programme, which aims to implant artificially developed embryos into another more abundant species of rhino in Kenya.
There are no known living males and neither of the two remaining northern white rhinos can carry a calf to term.
Northern white rhinos, which are actually grey, used to roam freely in several countries in east and central Africa, but their numbers fell sharply due to widespread poaching for their horns.
A Biorescue team led by researchers from the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Germany has been racing against time to save the world's most endangered mammal.
"The team has reached the decision to retire the older of the two remaining females, 32-year-old Najin, as a donor of egg cells," Biorescue said in a statement, citing ethical considerations.
Najin's advanced age, and signs of illness, were also taken into account, they said.
Scientists hope to implant embryos made from the rhinos' egg cells and frozen sperm from deceased males into surrogate mothers.
"We have been very successful with Fatu... So far we have 12 pure northern white rhino embryos," David Ndeereh, the acting deputy director for research at the Wildlife Research and Training Institute, a Kenyan state agency, told Reuters.
"We are very optimistic that the project will succeed."
The team hopes to be able to deliver its first northern white rhino calf in three years and a wider population in the next two decades.
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