The last few months have been bad for Facebook. The social network has been accused of having different rules for regular users and celebrities but more concerning are reports about how Instagram affects the mental health of users.
This week Frances Haugen, a former Facebook product manager turned whistleblower, revealed herself and made shocking allegations against Facebook. Among those allegations, Haugen claims that Facebook purposefully hid research from the public. This research would reportedly have shed light on the safety of children, the efficacy of its AI and how Facebook plays a role in the spreading of divisive and extreme messages.
“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,” Haugen said in a testimony before the US Senate.
“During my time at Facebook, first working as the lead product manager for civic misinformation, and later on counterespionage, I saw Facebook repeatedly encounter conflicts between its own profits and our safety. Facebook consistently resolve 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,” Haugen added.
The whistleblower went so far as to liken Facebook to tobacco companies who claimed that filter cigarettes were safer. While those claims could and were ultimately invalidated by independent studies, Haugen says that the same cannot be done with Facebook.
“We are given no other option than to take their marketing messages on blind faith. Not only does the company hide most of its own data, my disclosure has proved that 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,” said Haugen.
Zuck responds
While founder and Facebook chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg did not attend the hearing, he did decide to post a statement to his Facebook page.
His defence against these allegations? Rhetorical questions.
“Many of the claims don’t make any sense. If we wanted to ignore research, why would we create an industry-leading research program to understand these important issues in the first place? If we didn’t care about fighting harmful content, then why would we employ so many more people dedicated to this than any other company in our space — even ones larger than us? If we wanted to hide our results, why would we have established an industry-leading standard for transparency and reporting on what we’re doing? And if social media were as responsible for polarizing society as some people claim, then why are we seeing polarization increase in the US while it stays flat or declines in many countries with just as heavy use of social media around the world,” Zuckerberg wrote.
Here’s the problem Mark, the research results weren’t disclosed until a whistleblower disclosed the research and even then the full extent of it wasn’t disclosed to the public. Sure that research was given to Congress, but we very much doubt that information will ever be made public. Instead, the users of the platform that lines Zuckerberg’s pockets are fed a press release with little information and so much spin we thought we were at gym.
The Facebook CEO goes on to ask even more rhetorical questions including whether a company focused on profits would show folks less viral content and more content from family and friends. Well, yeah, if users stopped visiting the platform because all they saw were viral videos and nothing they cared about, that would be bad for Facebook’s bottom line.
We now await a response from the US Senate as well as the Securities and Exchange Commission as regards the allegations laid out by Haugen. As it stands though, Facebook’s outage earlier this week likely won’t be the worst thing to happen to the social network this week.
