Facebook In Serious Trouble After Lying To Investors About Tackling Fake News

According to complaints from whistleblowers - filed with the SEC - Facebook apparently misled investors about their efforts to combat misinformation related to climate change and COVID-19. This could be bad news for the company, as lying to investors is absolutely something that the authorities take seriously (even though they don't seem to care when consumers are lied to by corporations.) Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins explains what's happening.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

According to a new report from the Washington Post, Facebook based on evidence provided by whistleblowers, has apparently been misleading their investors about their efforts to get rid of misinformation and disinformation on their platform. Now, this complaint is not just coming from the whistleblowers, but they have also filed this complaint with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the SEC now has this complaint sitting in front of them saying that Facebook or Meta, I guess, has been misleading their own investors. And of course misleading the public, nobody cares about that. You're not gonna get in trouble for it. But, oh boy, when you mislead investors, when you potentially cause, cause rich people to lose money, then suddenly absolutely you're gonna get in trouble for that.

Just ask Bernie Madoff compared to any of the other banking CEOs who lead our economy straight into the ground and none of them spent a day in jail. But Bernie Madoff ripped off rich people. So yeah, he, he got busted for that. And it's kind of the same thing here with Meta and Facebook. So let me read this complaint. This is from the Washington Post. One complaint alleges that climate change misinformation was prominently available on Facebook and that the company lacked a clear policy on the issue as recently as last year, despite Facebook exec, executives committing to fight the global crisis during earnings calls. So before I continue, let's talk about that for a minute. They're on these earnings calls, which means they're on there with the shareholders, they're on there with their investors. They're telling we are doing X, Y, and Z.

However, in practice, they're not doing any of those things. So that would be the misleading of the investors. It continues. A second companion complaint argues that while Facebook executives were publicly touting their efforts to remove harmful COVID misinformation, internal documents quote, paint a different story. The complaint cites internal company communications about the spread of vaccine hesitancy in comments and internal surveys that showed the proliferation of COVID misinformation on the service. So they said they were doing something about COVID misinformation, internal documents say, no, we're not. They said they were doing something about climate misinformation, internal documents again, say, no, you're not. So yes, this would, of course, if everything is to be believed, if this is all accurate, this is actually a very easy cut and dry case of misleading the investors and the investors and shareholders of course, would have a very winnable lawsuit on their hands against Meta.

Now here's where things get interesting to me. We have a statement here from Drew Pusateri, who's a spokesperson from Meta who said, misinformation makes up a small amount of climate change content in the company's acts and that it spikes periodically, such as during extreme weather events. Okay. So the times when we should be talking about climate change, right? Extreme weather events, that's the grand opportunity to jump in there and talk about how climate change makes all these things worse, that's when misinformation spikes and you're acting like, hey, there's not a lot of it. Only when we really need to be talking about climate change is they're all of this misinformation all over our website that we're clearly not doing anything about.