Breaking point

FACEBOOK’S CIVIC-INTEGRITY TEAM WAS always different from the other teams that the social media company employed to combat misinformation and hate speech. For starters, its leader expected team members to subscribe to an informal oath vowing to “serve the people’s interest first, not Facebook’s.”

The “civic oath,” according to five former employees, charged team members with understanding Facebook’s impact on the world, keeping people safe and defusing angry polarization. Samidh Chakrabarti, the team’s leader, regularly referred to this oath—which has not been previously reported—as a set of guiding principles behind the team’s work, they said.

Chakrabarti’s team was effective in fixing some of the problems endemic to the platform, former employees and Facebook itself have said.

But just a month after the 2020 U.S. election, Facebook dissolved the civic-integrity team, and Chakrabarti took a leave of absence. Facebook said employees were assigned to other teams to help share the group’s experience across the company. But for many of the Facebook employees who had worked on the team, including a veteran product manager from Iowa named Frances Haugen, the message was clear: Facebook no longer wanted to concentrate power in a team whose priority was to put people ahead of profits.

Five weeks later, supporters of Donald Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol—after some of them had organized on Facebook and used the platform to spread the lie that the election had been stolen. The civic-integrity team’s dissolution made it harder for the platform to respond effectively to Jan. 6, a former team member who left Facebook this year told TIME. The former employee, along with several others TIME interviewed, spoke on the condition of anonymity, for fear