Facebook is struggling to keep thousands of internal documents leaked on the Internet

About 4,000 pages of Facebook's confidential and highly sensitive Facebook internal documents have been posted on the Internet, throwing an unprecedented light on the internal workings of the social media giant.

On Wednesday, investigative reporter Duncan Campbell published on his official website (duncancampbell.org) a wide range of emails, reports and other sensitive documents dating back to the early 2000s, detailing Facebook's internal approach to privacy and how it handles application developers. They are given access to user data.

The documents were originally collected as part of a lawsuit filed by Facebook's emerging company Six43 for blocking the first application from accessing the developer platform. The documents were supposed to remain confidential but leaked.

Some of the documents were already published on the Internet before Wednesday, and the British Parliament's Committee for Culture, Media and Sports published hundreds of pages in a report in December after it was acquired by Six-Three founder Ted Kramer when he visited the UK.

In the months before Kramer put the entire collection of documents in the public domain, Campbell shared them with reporters on NBC News and other news channels who then published many stories about them.

Facebook has fought hard to prevent the documents from being made public, arguing that they do not paint a balanced picture of their activities.

"These old documents were taken out of context by someone with an agenda against Facebook, and they were publicly distributed with total disregard for US law," she said in an e-mailed statement to Business Insider.

The following are the highlights of the documents:

Facebook has used its control over user data to beat competitors such as YouTube, Twitter and Amazon.The company reported its friends while taking tough measures to block access to competitors, framing its actions as necessary to protect users' privacy.

Facebook executives quietly planned a data policy that they referred to as the "Swecharo Plan." Facebook began blocking developers from accessing user data starting in 2012 to crush potential competitors, while offering the move to the general public as a "boon" to user privacy, according to The Reuters news agency on Wednesday quoted the leaked documents.

Facebook examined the possibility of charging companies for access to user data.Documents published in late 2018 revealed that from 2012 to 2014 Facebook considered forcing companies to pay to access user data (but did not go through the plan until the end).

Facebook has whitelisted some companies to allow them to access users' data more widely even as it closed its developer platform during 2014 and 2015, and it is unclear whether users know about it and how Facebook has decided which companies should whitelist.

Facebook planned to spy on Android users' websites, citing documents The Computer Weekly reported in February that "Facebook planned to use its Android application to track the location of its customers and allow advertisers to send political ads and invitations to dating sites to unrelated people."