The Facebook product manager who left the business in May, Frances Haugen, admitted to giving journalists and others internal documents about the company’s algorithm.
Frances Haugen, hired by Facebook as a product manager on the company’s “civic integrity team” to assist guard against election interference.
where she meticulously copied a cache of internal company documents from the heart of the Facebook Files to share with the Wall Street Journal, members of Congress and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
It could be the most influential act in Facebook’s corporate history, as the documents have revealed the extent to which the organisation itself realises it’s causing harm in the world.
Profit Over Safety
Haugen, who left the firm in May after nearly two years, said in a series of conversations with the Wall Street Journal and CBS’s 60 Minutes that she had come into the job with great hopes of helping Facebook fix its flaws.
She quickly lost faith in her team’s ability to make a difference, she admitted. The 37-year-old claimed that her team was short on resources and believed the firm prioritised growth and user engagement over what it knew from its research regarding the platforms’ adverse consequences.
She showed that the company believes that it only acts on 3 to 5 per cent of hateful content on the forum. Facebook did try to reorient its algorithms around friends and family in 2018.
The documents Haugen publicised showed that this initiative had the opposite effect and made the platform more divisive.
The explosive interviews revealed that the company’s stands exacerbate body image issues in teenage girls, allow some elite users to skirt the rules, are ineffective in combating human trafficking, and were unable to steer conversations on the platform away from vaccine hesitancy.
She stated that what she repeatedly noticed at Facebook was a conflict of interest between what was suitable for the public and Facebook. And Facebook has often chosen to optimise for its own goals, such as increasing revenue.
The Document Dump
According to the Journal, Haugen agreed to join Facebook’s 200-person civic integrity team after one of her friends became entangled in a web of misinformation and white nationalist ideals.
However, she discovered that her team lacked the resources to tackle challenging initiatives like developing algorithms to detect misinformation targeted at specific communities.
Facebook disbanded her crew after the 2020 election but before the Capitol riot. (Facebook maintains that it reassigned the roles of the team to different parts of the company.)
Haugen left the company in April and spent the final month of her employment rummaging through Facebook Workplace, an internal social network with thousands of confidential documents that are open to all employees.
She gathered a large number of documents and sought legal help from Whistleblower Aid, a non-profit organisation.
Haugen is scheduled to appear before Congress on Tuesday and has filed a request with the SEC for whistle-blower protection, which would safeguard her if Facebook tried to retaliate by accusing her of stealing company property.
Wish for absolute transparency
Instead of ruining or harming Facebook, Haugen claims she shared this knowledge to improve it.
She is particularly opposed to the corporation being broken up or amending Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a critical internet regulation, to weaken Facebook’s liability protections.
In reaction to the WSJ’s programme, Facebook commented that the teams must strike a balance between protecting billions of people’s ability to freely express themselves and the duty of keeping the platform a safe and positive environment every day.
To combat the spread of disinformation and harmful content, the company continue to make substantial progress, and it’s simply not correct to say that Facebook supports harmful content while doing nothing.
