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A trove of internal documents turned over to the SEC exposes Facebook\\u2019s role in fomenting the storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.

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Relief flowed through Facebook in the days after the 2020 presidential election. The company had cracked down on misinformation, foreign interference and hate speech \\u2014 and employees believed they had largely succeeded in limiting problems that, four years earlier, had brought on perhaps the most serious crisis in Facebook\\u2019s scandal-plagued history.

\\u201cIt was like we could take a victory lap,\\u201d said a former employee. \\u201cThere was a lot of the feeling of high-fiving in the office.\\u201d

Many who had worked on the election, exhausted from months of unrelenting toil, took leaves of absence or moved on to other jobs. Facebook rolled back many of the dozens of election-season measures that it had used to suppress hateful, deceptive content. A ban the company had imposed on the original Stop the Steal group stopped short of addressing dozens of look-alikes that popped up in what an internal Facebook after-action report called \\u201ccoordinated\\u201d and \\u201cmeteoric\\u201d growth. Meanwhile, the company\\u2019s Civic Integrity team was largely disbanded by a management that had grown weary of the team\\u2019s criticisms of the company, according to former employees.

But the high-fives, it soon became clear, were premature.

Elizabeth Dwoskin reports on how this gap in the company\\u2019s protective measures paved the way for rioters to organize the Jan. 6 insurrection using their platform.