Frances Haugen is her name.
Haugen is the Facebook whistleblower who will testify before Congress this week. She secretly copied tens of thousands of pages of Facebook internal research — research that showed the social media giant amplifies hate and misinformation and political unrest.
Haugen’s identity became public Sunday evening when she was interviewed by “60 Minutes” on CBS and profiled in The Wall Street Journal.
The “60 Minutes” interview, after a series of explosive Wall Street Journal stories based on the documents, paints a disturbing picture of Facebook.
Haugen told “60 Minutes’” Scott Pelley, “The thing I saw at Facebook over and over again was there were conflicts of interest between what was good for the public and what was good for Facebook. And Facebook, over and over again, chose to optimize for its own interests, like making more money.”
The most glaring, and frightening, example of the damage done was after the 2020 presidential election. Haugen worked in “Civic Integrity,” which worked on risks to elections including misinformation. But only until the election was over.
Haugen told Pelley, “They told us, ‘We’re dissolving Civic Integrity.’ Like, they basically said, ‘Oh good, we made it through the election. There wasn't riots. We can get rid of Civic Integrity now.’ Fast forward a couple months, we got the insurrection. And when they got rid of Civic Integrity, it was the moment where I was like, ‘I don’t trust that they’re willing to actually invest what needs to be invested to keep Facebook from being dangerous.’”
Nick Clegg, vice president of global affairs, said it’s “ludicrous” to blame the Jan. 6 insurrection on social media. In a wide-ranging interview on CNN’s “Reliable Sources,” Clegg told host Brian Stelter, “The responsibility for the violence of Jan. 6 lies squarely with the people who inflicted the violence and those who encouraged them, including President Trump.”
The Wall Street Journal’s Jeff Horwitz published another story just as the “60 Minutes” piece went to air: “The Facebook Whistleblower, Frances Haugen, Says She Wants to Fix the Company, Not Harm It.” It’s just the latest in the Journal’s superb series — “The Facebook Files.” The Journal wrote the documents “offer perhaps the clearest picture thus far of how broadly Facebook’s problems are known inside the company, up to the chief executive himself.”
On “Reliable Sources,” Clegg said, “There is no perfection on social media as much as in any other walk of life. And then what we have to do is address that.”
Among the more revealing insights in The Wall Street Journal’s investigation is teen girls develop negative feelings about themselves when going to Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, and that Facebook knows that Instagram is toxic for teen girls.
Clegg told Stelter, “I don’t think it's intuitively surprising that if you’re not feeling great about yourself already, then going onto social media can actually make you feel a bit worse.”
Haugen said, “… what’s super tragic is Facebook’s own research says, as these young women begin to consume this — this eating disorder content, they get more and more depressed. And it actually makes them use the app more. And so, they end up in this feedback cycle where they hate their bodies more and more. Facebook’s own research says it is not just that Instagram is dangerous for teenagers, that it harms teenagers, it’s that it is distinctly worse than other forms of social media.
Clegg told Stelter Facebook is working on tools to help steer teens away from certain types of content.
Clegg added, “We’re never going to be absolutely on top of this 100% of the time, because this is an instantaneous and spontaneous form of communication. There’s a world of difference between doing a peer-reviewed exercise in cooperation with other academics and preparing papers internally to provoke and inform internal discussion.”
Haugen went on to say that she didn’t believe that Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg set out to make a hateful platform.
“But,” she told Pelley, “he has allowed choices to be made where the side effects of those choices are that hateful, polarizing content gets more distribution and more reach.”
Haugen said she believes that the federal government should impose regulations and that’s why she is testifying this week.
Haugen said, “Facebook has demonstrated they cannot act independently. Facebook, over and over again, has shown it chooses profit over safety. It is subsidizing, it is paying for its profits with our safety. I’m hoping that this will have had a big enough impact on the world that they get the fortitude and the motivation to actually go put those regulations into place. That’s my hope.”
A major investigation
The Washington Post, along with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, is out with a major investigation called “The Pandora Papers.” The Post said the project worked with more than 600 journalists in 117 countries and territories, making it the largest project ever organized by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.
Post executive editor Sally Buzbee writes that the report includes how “documents — more than 11.9 million records from 14 offshore entities, including law and wealth-management firms — illuminate a hidden world that has allowed government leaders, a monarch, billionaires and criminals to shield their assets.”
She adds, “The Post decided to join this project because we felt certain that the breadth of records obtained by the ICIJ would shine a light on aspects of the international financial system that have operated with little or no oversight.”
The Guardian writes, “They expose the secret offshore affairs of 35 world leaders, including current and former presidents, prime ministers and heads of state. They also shine a light on the secret finances of more than 300 other public officials such as government ministers, judges, mayors and military generals in more than 90 countries.”
It’s a remarkable piece of work.
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