Frances Haugen, 37, who worked as a product manager on Facebook’s civic integrity team, was interviewed by CBS on Sunday. He said the documents he leaked showed that Facebook has repeatedly prioritized “Growth over safety”.
Facebook said the leaks were misleading and overlooked the positive research conducted by the company. In the interview, on CBS’s 60 Minutes program, Ms. Haugen said she left Facebook earlier this year after being exasperated by society. Before leaving, he copied a series of internal notes and documents.
He shared those documents with the Wall Street Journal, which has been releasing the material in batches over the past three weeks, sometimes referred to as Facebook Files. The revelations included documents showing that celebrities, politicians, and high-profile Facebook users were treated differently by the company. The leaks revealed that moderation policies were applied differently, or not at all, to those accounts: a system known as XCheck (cross-check).
Another leak showed that Facebook was also facing a complex lawsuit from a group of its own shareholders. The group claims, among other things, that Facebook’s $ 5 billion payment to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to resolve the data scandal Cambridge Analytica it was so high because it was designed to protect Mark Zuckerberg from personal liability.
But it is the accusations on Instagram that have been particularly worrying for US politicians. An internal search from Facebook (which owns Instagram) found that Instagram was having an impact on the mental health of adolescents, but did not share his findings when they suggested that the platform was a “toxic” place for many young people.
According to slides reported by the Wall Street Journal, 32% of teen girls surveyed said that when they felt bad about their body, Instagram made them feel worse. Ms. Haugen will testify before a Senate subcommittee on Tuesday in a titled hearing “Protecting children online”, on the company’s research on the effects of Instagram on the mental health of young users.
Facebook and the testimonies of Frances Haugen
Last week, a Facebook executive testified to US senators that the leaks had failed to highlight the positive impact the platform had on teens. However, Ms Haugen it was overwhelming in its assessment of his former employer.
“There were conflicts of interest between what was good for the audience and what was good for Facebook,” he said. “Facebook has chosen over and over to optimize for their own interests, how to make more money.”
Facebook vehemently denied that claim, stating of having spent large sums of money for security. “To say we turn a blind eye to feedback is to ignore these investments, including the 40,000 people working for security on Facebook and our $ 13 billion investment since 2016”, said Lena Pietsch, Facebook’s director of political communications.
Ms. Haugen also spoke about the deadly Capitol Hill riots in January, claiming that Facebook helped fuel the violence. He said Facebook activated security systems to reduce disinformation during the US election, but only temporarily.
“As soon as the elections were over, they rejected them, or changed the settings to what they were before, to prioritize growth over security, and this really looks like a betrayal of democracy.”
Appearing on CNN, Vice President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg said that it was ridiculous to suggest that Facebook was responsible for the riots.
“I think it gives people a false comfort to assume that there must be a technological, or technical, explanation for the problems of political polarization in the United States,” he said.