News Feed, the algorithm that powers the core of Facebook, resembles a giant irrigation system for the world’s information. Working properly, it nourishes all the crops that different people like to eat. Sometimes, though, it gets diverted entirely to sugar plantations while the wheat fields and almond trees die. Or it gets polluted because Russian trolls and Macedonian teens toss in LSD tablets and dead raccoons.

For years, the workings of News Feed were rather opaque. The company as a whole was shrouded in secrecy. Little about the algorithms got explained and employees were fired for speaking out of turn to the press. Now Facebook is everywhere. Mark Zuckerberg has been testifying to the European Parliament via livestream, taking hard questions from reporters, and giving tech support to the Senate. Senior executives are tweeting. The company is running ads during the NBA playoffs.

In that spirit, Facebook is today making three important announcements on false news, to which WIRED got an early and exclusive look. In addition, WIRED was able to sit down for a wide-ranging conversation with eight generally press-shy product managers and engineers who work on News Feed to ask detailed questions about the workings of the canals, dams, and rivers that they manage.

The first new announcement: Facebook will soon issue a request for proposals from academics eager to study false news on the platform. Researchers who are accepted will get data and money; the public will get, ideally, elusive answers to how much false news actually exists and how much it matters. The second announcement is the launch of a public education campaign that will utilize the top of Facebook’s homepage, perhaps the most valuable real estate on the internet. Users will be taught what false news is and how they can stop its spread. Facebook knows it is at war, and it wants to teach the populace how to join its side of the fight. The third announcement—and the one the company seems most excited about—is the release of a nearly 12-minute video called “Facing Facts,” a title that suggests both the topic and the repentant tone.

The film, which is embedded at the bottom of this post, stars the product and engineering managers who are combating false news, and was directed by Morgan Neville, who won an Academy Award for 20 Feet from Stardom. That documentary was about backup singers, and this one essentially is too. It’s a rare look at the people who run News Feed: the nerds you’ve never heard of who run perhaps the most powerful algorithm in the world. In Stardom, Neville told the story through close-up interviews and B-roll of his protagonists shaking their hips on stage. This one is told through close-up interviews and B-roll of his protagonists staring pensively at their screens.

In many ways, News Feed is Facebook: It’s an algorithm comprised of thousands of factors that determines whether you see baby pictures, white papers, shitposts, or Russian agitprop. Facebook typically guards information about the way the Army guards Fort Knox. This makes any information about it valuable, which makes the film itself valuable. And right from the start, Neville signals that he’s not going to merely scoop out a bowl of peppermint propaganda. The opening music is slightly ominous, leading into the voice of John Dickerson, of CBS News, intoning about the bogus stories that flourished on the platform during the 2016 election. Critical news headlines blare, and Facebook employees, one carrying a skateboard and one a New Yorker tote, move methodically up the stairs into headquarters.

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The message is clear: Facebook knows it screwed up, and it wants us all to know it knows it screwed up. The company is confessing and asking for redemption. “It was a really difficult and painful thing,” intones Adam Mosseri, who ran News Feed until recently, when he moved over to run product at Instagram. “But I think the scrutiny was fundamentally a helpful thing.”