On Monday, the consortium of news organizations tasked with combing through Frances Haugen’s Facebook documents expanded its ranks to include my small, independent newsletter, Big Technology. While it’s nice to be in this consortium — which includes the AP, The New York Times, The Atlantic, and others — I now believe it’s time to dissolve it.
The Facebook documents that Haugen’s handed over to us — thousands upon thousands, with information about crucial aspects of Facebook’s decision-making — are simply too important to the public interest to keep under wraps. Right now, they’re available to us in a Google Drive, organized fairly neatly, and we are able to download them. But instead of a consortium of reporters sorting through them and writing stories based on what we see, we should expand our efforts to focus on the responsible redaction and wide release of these documents.
Releasing the documents will be challenging, no doubt. In their current form, they are poorly redacted and can’t simply be dumped on the web due to privacy and safety concerns. Some documents also contain issues dealing with national security that may not make sense to release immediately, or at all.
[…]
News Item