Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen calls for
urgent external regulation
Ex-employee tells UK MPs Mark Zuckerberg ‘has
unilateral control over 3bn people’ due to his position
Jim
Waterson and Dan Milmo
Mon 25 Oct 2021
18.44 BST
Mark
Zuckerberg “has unilateral control over 3 billion people” due to his
unassailable position at the top of Facebook, the whistleblower Frances Haugen
told MPs as she called for urgent external regulation to rein in the tech
company’s management and reduce the harm being done to society.
Haugen, a
former Facebook employee who released tens of thousands of damaging documents
about its inner workings, travelled to London from the US for a parliamentary
hearing and gave qualified backing to UK government proposals to regulate
social media platforms and make them take some responsibility for content on
their sites.
The
company’s internal culture prioritised profitability over its impact on the
wider world, said Haugen, and “there is no will at the top to make sure these
systems are run in an adequately safe way”. She added: “Until we bring in a
counterweight, these things will be operated for the shareholders’ interest and
not the public interest.”
She warned
that Instagram, which is owned by Facebook and used by millions of children
worldwide, may never be safe for pre-teens.
Addressing
a group of MPs and peers on Monday, Haugen said much of the blame for the
world’s increasingly polarised politics lay with social networks and the
radicalising impact of services such as Facebook Groups.
These can
encourage small and intense communities that breed conspiracy theories, she
said. “I am deeply concerned that they have made a product that can lead people
away from their real communities and isolate them in these rabbit holes and
these filter bubbles. What you find is that when people are sent targeted
misinformation to a community, it can make it hard to reintegrate into wider
society because now you don’t have shared facts.”
Amid growing
concerns about the impact of Instagram on the mental health and body image of
teenagers, Haugen said Facebook’s own research likened the app’s young users to
addicts who feel unable to step away from a service that makes them unhappy.
“The last
thing they see at night is someone being cruel to them. The first thing they
see in the morning is a hateful statement and that is just so much worse.” She
claimed the company’s own research found Instagram was more dangerous than
other social media such as TikTok and Snapchat because the platform is focused
on “social comparison about bodies, about people’s lifestyles, and that’s what
ends up being worse for kids”.
She added:
“I’m deeply worried it may not be possible to make Instagram safe for a
14-year-old and I sincerely doubt it’s possible to make it safe for a
10-year-old.”
The
whistleblower also urged Facebook to make it harder to share material, in order
to slow the sharing of hate and disinformation, while also pushing more content
from people’s family and friends into users’ newsfeeds: “Moving to systems that
are human-scaled is the safest way to design social media. We liked social
media before we had an algorithmic feed.”
One of her
particular concerns is how Facebook can “mislead” the public into thinking that
it is prioritising the tackling of disinformation outside the English-speaking
world, while highlighting its impact on societal divisions in Myanmar and
Ethiopia. She suggested that tools designed to reduce harm in English-language
posts may be less effective in the UK because they were developed using
American English.
Facebook’s
ownership is structured so that Zuckerberg, as founder of the company, has a
special class of share that means he alone ultimately controls the business.
This gives him enormous control over the eponymous social network as well as
Facebook-owned Instagram and WhatsApp.
Haugen said
the company was full of “good, kind, conscientious people”, but they were
working with bad incentives set by management and the requirement to maximise
financial returns to shareholders. “Facebook has been unwilling to accept even
little slivers of profit being sacrificed for safety. And that’s not
acceptable.”
She said
there were few incentives inside the company to raise flaws and deal with the
side-effects of its business model. “Facebook never set out to prioritise
polarising and decisive content; it just happened to be a side-effect of the
choices they did make.”
Speaking in
an earnings call with investors on Monday, Zuckerberg spoke to the document
leak but did not address the contents directly, saying the issues the company
is facing “aren’t primarily about social media” but relating to “polarization
[that] started rising in the US before I was born”.
“My view on
what we are seeing is a coordinated effort to selectively use leaked documents
to create a false picture about our company,” he added, as the company reported
a quarterly profit of $9bn.
A Facebook
spokesperson said: “At the heart of these stories is a premise which is false.
Yes, we’re a business and we make profit, but the idea that we do so at the
expense of people’s safety or wellbeing misunderstands where our own commercial
interests lie. The truth is we’ve invested $13bn and have over 40,000 people to
do one job: keep people safe on Facebook.”
Kari Paul contributed reporting
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