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As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowA former Facebook data scientist told Congress on Tuesday that the social network giant’s products harm children and fuel polarization in the U.S. while its executives refuse to change because they elevate profits over safety. And she laid responsibility with the company’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Frances Haugen testified to the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Consumer Protection. Speaking confidently at a charged hearing, she accused the company of being aware of apparent harm to some teens from Instagram and being dishonest in its public fight against hate and misinformation.
“Facebook’s products harm children, stoke division and weaken our democracy,” Haugen said. “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.”
“Congressional action is needed,” she said. “They won’t solve this crisis without your help.”
Haugen said the company has acknowledged publicly that integrity controls were crucially needed for its systems that stoke the engagement of users, but then it disabled some of those controls.
In dialogue with receptive senators of both parties, Haugen, who focused on algorithm products in her work at Facebook, explained the importance to the company of algorithms that govern what shows up on users’ news feeds. She said a 2018 change to the content flow contributed to more divisiveness and ill will in a network ostensibly created to bring people closer together.
Despite the enmity that the new algorithms were feeding, she said Facebook found that they helped keep people coming back — a pattern that helped the social media giant sell more of the digital ads that generate most of its revenue.
Senators agreed.
“It has profited off spreading misinformation and disinformation and sowing hate,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., the panel’s chairman. “Facebook’s answers to Facebook’s destructive impact always seems to be more Facebook, we need more Facebook — which means more pain, and more money for Facebook.”
Haugen said she believed Facebook didn’t set out to build a destructive platform. But “in the end, the buck stops with Mark,” she said referring to Zuckerberg, who controls more than 50% of Facebook’s voting shares. “There is no one currently holding Mark accountable but himself.”
Haugen said she believed that Zuckerberg was familiar with some of the internal research showing concerns for potential negative impacts of Instagram.
The government needs to step in with stricter oversight of the company, Haugen said.
Like fellow tech giants Google, Amazon and Apple, Facebook has enjoyed minimal regulation. A number of bipartisan legislative proposals for the tech industry address data privacy, protection of young people and anti-competitive conduct. But getting new laws through Congress is a heavy slog. The Federal Trade Commission has adopted a stricter stance recently toward Facebook and other companies.
The subcommittee is examining Facebook’s use of information from its own researchers on Instagram that could indicate potential harm for some of its young users, especially girls, while it publicly downplayed the negative impacts. For some of the teens devoted to Facebook’s popular photo-sharing platform, the peer pressure generated by the visually focused Instagram led to mental health and body-image problems, and in some cases, eating disorders and suicidal thoughts, the research leaked by Haugen showed.
One internal study cited 13.5% of teen girls saying Instagram makes thoughts of suicide worse and 17% of teen girls saying it makes eating disorders worse.
Because of the drive for user engagement, Haugen testified, “Facebook knows that they are leading young users to anorexia content. … It’s just like cigarettes. Teenagers don’t have any self-regulation. We need to protect the kids.”
Haugen has come forward with a wide-ranging condemnation of Facebook, buttressed with tens of thousands of pages of internal research documents she secretly copied before leaving her job in the company’s civic integrity unit. She also has filed complaints with federal authorities alleging that Facebook’s own research shows that it amplifies hate, misinformation and political unrest, but the company hides what it knows.
“The company intentionally hides vital information from the public, from the U.S. government and from governments around the world,” Haugen said. “The documents I have provided to Congress 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.”
The former employee challenging the social network giant with 2.8 billion users worldwide and nearly $1 trillion in market value is a 37-year-old data expert from Iowa with a degree in computer engineering and a master’s degree in business from Harvard. Prior to being recruited by Facebook in 2019, she worked for 15 years at tech companies including Google, Pinterest and Yelp.
After recent reports in The Wall Street Journal based on documents she leaked to the newspaper raised a public outcry, Haugen revealed her identity in a CBS “60 Minutes” interview aired Sunday night.
As the public relations debacle over the Instagram research grew last week, Facebook put on hold its work on a kids’ version of Instagram, which the company says is meant mainly for tweens aged 10 to 12.
Haugen said that Facebook prematurely turned off safeguards designed to thwart misinformation and incitement to violence after Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump last year, alleging that contributed to the deadly Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol.
After the November election, Facebook dissolved the civic integrity unit where Haugen had been working. That, she says, was the moment she realized “I don’t trust that they’re willing to actually invest what needs to be invested to keep Facebook from being dangerous.”
Haugen says she told Facebook executives when they recruited her that she wanted to work in an area of the company that fights misinformation, because she had lost a friend to online conspiracy theories.
Facebook maintains that Haugen’s allegations are misleading and insists there is no evidence to support the premise that it is the primary cause of social polarization.
“Even with the most sophisticated technology, which I believe we deploy, even with the tens of thousands of people that we employ to try and maintain safety and integrity on our platform, we’re never going to be absolutely on top of this 100% of the time,” Nick Clegg, Facebook’s vice president of policy and public affairs, said Sunday on CNN’s “Reliable Sources.”
That’s because of the “instantaneous and spontaneous form of communication” on Facebook, Clegg said, adding, “I think we do more than any reasonable person can expect to.”
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Quote: Facebook maintains that Haugen’s allegations are misleading and insists there is no evidence to support the premise that it is the primary cause of social polarization.
Easily explained; they can’t see the forest for their own trees. Anything to take down the arrogant, leftist control of Facebook has my support.
Leftist?
Donald Trump would have never been President if not for Facebook.
Facebook is the greatest tool that Republicans have. You should be sticking up for their ability to lie to people to keep them angry and voting Republican, Bob.
Bob, go look at the top ten links shared on Facebook each day.
Dan Boingo, Ben Shapiro, Daily Caller, Breitbart, Newsmax … sure seem to do quite well there, ya think?
https://twitter.com/FacebooksTop10
Finally, Bob, a guy named Joel Kaplan runs their public policy. He worked in the Bush administration, is reportedly buddies with Justice Kavanaugh, and law clerked for Scalia.
And he’s not alone.
The Republican political operatives who call the shots at Facebook
https://popular.info/p/the-republican-political-operatives
If Facebook is too liberal for you after reading all that, I’m not sure what to tell you. Maybe you’re too conservative?
Joe B. You should work for Facebook.
I think I’d be better off working for a tobacco company.
No mention of the hard leftist leanings and financial contributions of this so-called “whistleblower,” nor the fact that she is actually pro-censorship…as long as what is being censored is not what she agrees with?
Obviously Joe B. is a deluded and “dyed in the wool” follower of the largest catastrophe that has happened to this country in the last 60 years and blindly repeats the talking points put out by the National Democratic Party. Yes, Joe, Donald Trump would not have won the 2016 election without Facebook. However, that is before they actually got into politics and the shut down anything that he had to say in 2020 and presented only one point of view. The reason Trump did so well in 2016 Facebook didn’t limit any point of view and Donald Trump had a fair shot.
The only reason the Democrats are now willing to go after Facebook is because they are no longer all on board with the Biden Harris point of view (debacle) There is fighting within the party because they know Biden/Harris/Pelosi is one huge train wreck about to destroy their control and what has become essentially one huge act of treason, where the President and his party are doin un-/constitutional acts and running rough shod over the will of most of the people of the country. Whether its good or not are forcing people to be injected with untested “vaccines” and very untested boosters. So “Joe B” stop with the Democrat propaganda. This is NOT the old Soviet Union.
I’m amazed how many Republicans have come around the idea that government should mandate private businesses carry their point of view. What happened to the free market? How come the Republican alternative to Facebook hasn’t taken off?
Donald Trump was allowed violate the terms of service for all of these social media platforms for YEARS, and the stated rules were only enforced after he sparked an insurrection against the United States Congress. If he hadn’t gone down the road with all of this stolen election nonsense, he would still be on all of those platforms. (How’d that Arizona audit go, anyway.). As usual, Trump has no one to blame but himself… But it’s everyone else’s fault, never trumps. Last time I checked he was not Jesus Christ.
Here is the simple reality of right wing media – they are feeding their voters nonsense because right wing voters are so angry and so filled with misinformation that they have to keep feeding the beast. You can’t tell a right wing voter the truth or they will lose their minds. Trump and Lindsey Graham both got booed for encouraging people to get vaccinated. Fox News knows they are peddling anti-vaccine nonsense for money. The talking heads don’t actually believe any of what they’re saying, they are all vaccinated.
The vaccine project will go down as Trump’s greatest accomplishment and his own voters would rather die than take it! How screwed up is that?
“One Fox News insider succinctly described the anti-COVID-mandate segments and vaccine-resistant commentary as “great for ratings.” Another current Fox employee said the numbers clearly demonstrated that there are vanishingly fewer subjects these days that get “our viewers more excited or engaged than” those kinds of segments.”
https://www.thedailybeast.com/gop-launches-fundraising-frenzy-off-biden-vax-mandates