Interview
Frances Haugen: ‘I never wanted to be a
whistleblower. But lives were in danger’
Dan Milmo
Global technology editor
The woman whose revelations have rocked Facebook tells
how spending time with her mother, a priest, motivated her to speak out
Sun 24 Oct
2021 02.02 BST
This was
not Frances Haugen’s plan A. The Facebook whistleblower says she does not like
being the centre of attention, but what she saw while working at Mark
Zuckerberg’s social media empire compelled her into action – and made her
famous.
“When I
look at what I did, this was not my plan A. It wasn’t my plan B, it wasn’t my
plan C. It was like my plan J or something,” she laughs. “No one sat me down
and said ‘what I want you to do is whistleblow’.”
But that is
what Haugen did. In May this year she left her position as a product manager at
the social media giant and took tens of thousands of internal documents with
her. The documents have triggered a maelstrom of allegations, including that
Facebook knew its products were damaging teenagers’ mental health, were
fomenting ethnic violence in countries such as Ethiopia and were failing to
curb misinformation before the 6 January Washington riots. On Monday, Haugen
will take her damning views of the company to Westminster when she testifies
before MPs and peers. Meanwhile, Facebook spirals deeper into crisis.
Haugen, 37,
says the turning point came when she moved in with her mother, who had given up
an academic career to become a priest. “I am really lucky that my mother is an
episcopal priest,” says Haugen, who was born and raised in Iowa. “I lived with
her for six months last year and I had such profound distress because I was
seeing these things inside of Facebook and I was certain it was not going to be
fixed inside of Facebook.”
Her
concerns over an apparent lack of safety controls in non-English language
markets, such as Africa and the Middle East, where the Facebook platform was
being used by human traffickers and armed groups in Ethiopia, were a key factor
in her decision to act.
“I did what
I thought was necessary to save the lives of people, especially in the global
south, who I think are being endangered by Facebook’s prioritisation of profits
over people. If I hadn’t brought those documents forward that was never going
to come to light.”
Speaking to
the Observer over a video link, Haugen displays none of the stress you’d expect
from taking on a near-$1tn (£730bn) company with its ranks of lawyers and
advisers. Haugen’s expansive and upbeat answers, sometimes punctuated with
laughter, contrast with the measured performance she gave to US senators on
Capitol Hill on 5 October in which she memorably accused the company of putting
“astronomical profits before people”. It’s the kind of conversation you’d
expect to have with a successful Silicon Valley professional working at one of
the world’s biggest tech companies, which Haugen was until five months ago.
“We have
intentionally not been doing many interviews, because it is not about me, it’s
about the documents,” she says. “I don’t throw birthday parties because I don’t
like being the centre of attention.”
Haugen says
her friends and family have been supportive since she stepped forward this
month as the source of a series of Wall Street Journal revelations based on her
leaks. “A friend of mine, right before I did testimony, gave me this wonderful
saying, which is what I repeat to myself when I have anxiety, which is, it’s
not about you: you are the conduit for the documents,” she says.
Haugen says
her new home, next to the Atlantic Ocean in Puerto Rico, helps. She is talking
to the Observer from the Caribbean island and US territory in its capital San
Juan, where she is afforded an anonymity that she doubts she would have been
given in northern California.
“I feel
very lucky that I live in Puerto Rico because no one has ever recognised me
here.”
She adds:
“I think if I was still living in San Francisco it would be really stressful
because I am sure that people would recognise me there.” In San Juan, she says,
it’s “a lot easier to stay sane. Here I can go for a swim or … I like to cook.
I can go to any of the little markets and I just feel like a normal person. So
it hasn’t felt like that big of a change, really.”
There are
health reasons for the Puerto Rico move too. A decade ago she was diagnosed
with coeliac disease, an autoimmune condition, and in 2014 she entered an
intensive care unit with a blood clot in her thigh. She recovered, but still
suffers pain from nerve damage in her legs.
Haugen
admits she isn’t looking forward to the colder weather when she arrives in Europe,
for a trip that includes her Westminster appointment on Monday and the annual
Web Summit tech conference in Lisbon next week. But she is in huge demand and
the documents she leaked continue to make waves, with a fresh release of
reports into those memos by a group of media organisations including the New
York Times, on top of the WSJ’s initial efforts. This weekend it was reported
that Facebook bungled its attempt to curb hate speech before the 6 January
Washington riots and that employees repeatedly flagged concerns before and
after the US presidential election, when Donald Trump tried to overturn Joe
Biden’s victory.
The
revelations have been relentless since the WSJ first started reporting on the
documents and give the impression of a company that is unable, or unwilling, to
combat the consequences of its huge scale. Facebook’s family of apps –
including its main platform, Facebook messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp – is
used by 2.8 billion people a day. With politicians and regulators on both sides
of the Atlantic closing in, it has been reported that Zuckerberg will announce
a rebranding of the parent company this week in a bid to put distance between
his business and the revelations.
For Haugen,
Zuckerberg is a big part of the problem. The Facebook founder and chief
executive controls a majority of the voting shares in the company, which makes
his position unassailable. That has to change, says Haugen, and she believes
independent investors in Facebook would seek change at the top if they could.
“I believe
in shareholder rights and the shareholders, or shareholders minus Mark, have
been asking for years for one share, one vote. And the reason for that is, I am
pretty sure the shareholders would choose other leadership if they had an
option.”
Against a
backdrop of revelations about Instagram’s damaging impact on teen mental health
and Facebook’s failure to police rightwing hate speech and misinformation in
its home market, Haugen says Zuckerberg has failed to show he can protect the public
from the negative effects of his networks.
“He has all
the control. He has no oversight and he has not demonstrated that he is willing
to govern that company at the level that is necessary for public safety.”
In a
statement Facebook 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.”
Facebook
reported a net income, a US measure of profit, of $29bn (£21bn) last year.
The
spokesperson added: “We have no commercial or moral incentive to do anything
other than give the maximum number of people as much of a positive experience
as possible. Like every platform, we are constantly making difficult decisions
between free expression and harmful speech, security, and other issues, and we
don’t make these decisions inside a vacuum – we rely on the input of our teams,
as well as external subject matter experts to navigate them. But drawing these
societal lines is always better left to elected leaders, which is why we’ve
spent many years advocating for updated internet regulations.”
Haugen’s
appearance in London on Monday is before the joint committee on the draft
online safety bill. The proposed bill – which Boris Johnson has promised to
fast track – imposes a duty of care on social media companies to protect users
from harmful content, or face the threat of multibillion-pound fines from the
communications regulator, Ofcom.
Haugen says
she is still considering what to say about the bill but backs at least one of
its measures, which requires companies such as Facebook to give Ofcom a “risk
assessment” of content that causes harm to users. “I do believe in things like
risk assessments. Facebook should have to provide articulations of what they
believe to be the risks on the platform. Right now Facebook never gives us
details about how they are going to fix problems.” Before she left Facebook,
Haugen worked on the company’s civic integrity team which, before it was
disbanded, had been tasked with monitoring electoral interference on the
platform.
Haugen
wants to see more “friction” introduced into Facebook’s systems, such as
Twitter asking users to read a link before they post it, to have the Facebook
platform embrace a chronological, and therefore less provocative news feed, and
for greater transparency to be forced on the company. Facebook, and the huge
amounts of data it amasses internally, must face regular and ad hoc scrutiny by
regulators, says Haugen.
“There
needs to be an avenue where we can escalate a concern and they actually have to
give us a response.”
In the
future, Haugen wants to start a non-profit organisation that supports this kind
of social media reform. “These are the solutions that will protect people in
the most fragile places in the world.”
In the
meantime, she hopes that Zuckerberg and his senior colleagues listen.
“I have
this hope my disclosure will be large enough, and give impact enough, that he
gets an opportunity to say, ‘I made some mistakes, I want to start over’,” she
says. “Because the point of moral bankruptcy is … saying you deserve a chance
to start over, that we as a society do better when people get a chance to wipe
the slate.”
Facebook executive says tech firms need stronger
regulation
Vice-president of content policy believes government
regulation can ‘establish standards all companies should meet’
Monika Bickert’s comments come as tech companies and
their critics prepare to talk about new rules to deal with harmful content
online in the UK parliament. Photograph: Chris Delmas/AFP/Getty Images
Nadeem
Badshah and agency
Sat 23 Oct
2021 23.52 BST
The tech
industry “needs regulation” because it should not be left to make the rules on
issues including harmful online content on its own, a Facebook executive has
said.
Monika
Bickert, Facebook’s vice-president of content policy, believes that “government
regulation can establish standards all companies should meet”.
Her
comments come as tech companies and some of their staunchest critics head to
parliament this week to talk about new rules to deal with harmful content
online.
Among those
who will testify before MPs and peers is Frances Haugen, a former project
manager at Facebook who leaked tens of thousands of internal documents.
The
documents include allegations that the social media juggernaut knew its
products were damaging teenagers’ mental health and were instigating ethnic
violence in countries such as Ethiopia.
They also
allege that Facebook employees repeatedly flagged concerns before and after the
election, when Trump tried to falsely overturn Joe Biden’s victory. According
to the New York Times, a company data scientist told co-workers a week after
the election that 10% of all US views of political content were of posts that
falsely claimed the vote was fraudulent.
Writing in
the Sunday Telegraph, Bickert stated: “While there will no doubt be differing
views, we should all agree on one thing: the tech industry needs regulation.
“At
Facebook we’ve advocated for democratic governments to set new rules for the
internet on areas like harmful content, privacy, data, and elections, because
we believe that businesses like ours should not be making these decisions on
our own.
“The UK is
one of the countries leading the way with wide-ranging proposals on everything
from hate speech to child safety and, while we won’t agree with all the
details, we’re pleased the online safety bill is moving forward.”
The culture
secretary, Nadine Dorries, has said that online hate has “poisoned public life”
and the government had been spurred to re-examine its upcoming online safety
bill in the light of the death of MP Sir David Amess in his constituency.
Dorries has
said that Amess’s death may not have been stopped by a crackdown on online
abuse, but it had highlighted the threats faced by people in the public eye.
Calls have
been made for social media companies to hand over the data more quickly and
rapidly remove the content themselves. The bill should also force platforms to
stop amplifying hateful content via their algorithms.
Bickert
wrote in the newspaper that “once parliament passes the online safety bill,
Ofcom will ensure all tech companies are held to account”.
She
suggested that “companies should also be judged on how their rules are
enforced”.
Facebook
has been publishing figures on how it deals with harmful content, including how
much of it is seen and taken down, for the past three years. The firm is also
independently audited.
Bickert
wrote: “I spent more than a decade as a criminal prosecutor in the US before
joining Facebook, and for the past nine years I’ve helped our company develop
its rules on what is and isn’t allowed on our platforms.
“These
policies seek to protect people from harm while also protecting freedom of expression.
“Our team
includes former prosecutors, law enforcement officers, counter-terrorism
specialists, teachers and child safety advocates, and we work with hundreds of
independent experts around the world to help us get the balance right.
“While people
often disagree about exactly where to draw the line, government regulation can
establish standards all companies should meet.”
She said
that Facebook has a commercial incentive to remove harmful content from its
sites because “people don’t want to see it when they use our apps and
advertisers don’t want their ads next to it”.
The amount
of hate speech seen on Facebook has been found to be about five views per
10,000, as detection of it has improved.
Bickert
stated: “Of the hate speech we removed, we found 97% before anyone reported it
to us – up from just 23% a few years ago. While we have further to go, the
enforcement reports show that we are making progress.”
Earlier
this week, a report found that an international pressure group that spread
false and conspiratorial claims about Covid-19 more than doubled the average
number of interactions it got on Facebook in the first six months of 2021.
Pages owned
by the World Doctors Alliance, a group of current and former medical
professionals and academics from seven countries, received 617,000 interactions
in June 2021, up from 255,000 in January, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue
found.
The World
Doctors Alliance includes prominent members who have falsely claimed that
Covid-19 is a hoax and vaccines cause widespread harm.
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