"A whistleblower makes serious allegations about the social media giant."
"A whistleblower makes serious allegations about the social media giant."
On Tuesday, Oct 5, a former Facebook employee, Frances Haugen appeared before the United States Senate Sub-Committee on Consumer Protection and Product Safety. She denounced her former employer, Facebook, the world’s largest and popular social media company, with 2.89 billion active users and a market value of $333 billion.
Haugen specializes in “algorithmic product management” (basically how to create and operate software). She studied electrical and computer engineering, has worked with four different social networks, and has an MBA from Harvard. She had worked for nearly two years with Facebook until May this year. FB has 63,000 employees. Haugen copied thousands of Facebook documents and gave some of them to the Wall Street Journal, which ran a series of articles, the Facebook Files.
“I’m here today because I believe Facebook’s products harm children, stoke division, and weaken our democracy,” Haugen told senators.
“The company’s leadership knows how to make Facebook and Instagram safer, but won’t make the necessary changes because they have put their astronomical profits before people,” she contended. She asked the Senate, or Congress, to go after Facebook, rein in its power over minds and people. Through regulation and legislation.
The day before, Monday, Facebook was shut down, for no apparent reason.
“I don’t know why it went down,” Haugen huffed, “but I know that for more than five hours, Facebook wasn’t used to deepen divides, destabilize democracies, and make young girls and women feel bad about their bodies. It also means that millions of small businesses weren’t able to reach potential customers and countless photos of new babies weren’t joyously celebrated by family and friends around the world.”
“The choices being made inside of Facebook are disastrous for our children, for our public safety, for our privacy and for our democracy. And that is why we must demand Facebook make changes,” Haugen said.
At the Senate hearing, Haugen described a faulty Facebook algorithm. It rewards posts that generate meaningful social interactions (MSIs), prioritizes interactions (such as comments and likes) from the people who Facebook thinks the user is closest to, like friends and family.
This system yields “unhealthy side effects on important slices of public content, such as politics and news.”
Facebook also uses engagement-based (the Likes) ranking, in which an AI displays the content that it thinks will be most interesting to individual users. It selects and prioritizes content that elicits stronger reactions from users, boosting misinformation, toxicity and violent content.
“I’ve spent most of my career working on systems like engagement-based ranking. When I come to you and say these things, I’m basically damning 10 years of my own work,” Haugen said at the hearing.
Haugen first worked at Facebook as the lead product manager for civic misinformation, and later on counterespionage. During over three hours of testimony, she related to the Senate:
“I saw Facebook repeatedly encounter conflicts between its own profits and our safety. Facebook consistently resolves these conflicts in favor of its own profits. The result has been more division, more harm, more lies, more threats, and more combat. In some cases, this dangerous online talk has led to actual violence that harms and even kills people. This is not simply a matter of certain social media users being angry or unstable, or about one side being radicalized against the other, it is about Facebook choosing to grow at all costs, becoming an almost trillion dollar company by buying its profits with our safety.”
Haugen came upon a devastating truth: “Almost no one outside of Facebook knows what happens inside of Facebook. The company intentionally hides vital information from the public, from the US government and from governments around the world.”
The whistleblower provided Congress documents which she said “prove that Facebook has repeatedly misled the public about what its own research reveals about the safety of children, the efficacy of its artificial intelligence systems and its role in spreading divisive and extreme messages. I came forward because I believe that every human being deserves the dignity of the truth.”
Under Section 230 of a 25-year-old law, the Communications Decency Act, social media companies cannot be sued for contents purveyed by its users online. Haugen wants it repealed or a law entirely passed to make social media companies responsible for content generated by its users.
“As long as Facebook is operating in the shadows, hiding its research from public scrutiny, it is unaccountable. Until the incentives change, Facebook will not change. Left alone, Facebook will continue to make choices that go against the common good. Our common good,” Haugen argued with passion, adding:
“Not only does the company hide most of its own data. When Facebook is directly asked questions as important as how do you impact the health and safety of our children, they mislead and they choose to mislead and misdirect. Facebook has not earned our blind faith.”
“This inability to see into Facebook’s actual systems and confirm that they work as communicated is like the Department of Transportation regulating cars by only watching them drive down the highway,” Haugen said.
In Haugen’s view, Facebook is emphasizing a false choice — that they can either use their volatile algorithms and continue their rapid growth, or they can prioritize user safety and decline.
“With appropriate oversight and some of these constraints, it’s possible that Facebook could actually be a much more profitable company five or 10 years down the road, because it wasn’t as toxic, and not as many people quit it,” she said.
Facebook has denied Haugen’s allegations, implying she didn’t have top-level access to enable her conclusions and that she stole documents from the company.
