Frances Haugen, a 37-year-old computer engineer from Iowa, was the person who leaked the internal Facebook documents that support the latest exclusives published by The Wall Street Journal. Among them, the information that the company was aware that Instagram, its photo social network, was toxic for many teenagers. The former employee of the company revealed her identity early this Monday in a television program with the highest audience and this Tuesday she will testify about the network in the US Congress.
“There were constant conflicts of interest between what is good for the public and what is good for Facebook,” Haugen said in 60 Minutes, from the CBS network. “Facebook always chose to optimize for its own interest, make more money,” said the former employee. Haugen managed to get a large number of investigative documents and internal chat messages showing that Facebook hides a good part of the evils caused by the company. “I had to take enough [material] so that no one could question that this is real, “he said on the show.
“I have seen several networks on the inside and Facebook is substantially worse,” said Haugen, who has worked at Google and Pinterest, before going to Facebook in 2019. Haugen was within the Civic Integrity department, in charge of making the network “out a force for the good of society ”. Weeks after the November 2020 election, won by Joe Biden, the platform decided to suppress that team. “There has been no disturbance, we can disband you,” Haugen says they were told. That was the moment when he became convinced that the company would never improve its platform by itself and decided to go to the press and federal authorities. “Facebook is full of good and conscientious people. But inside you know things that no one outside knows. Imagine how it corrodes you, ”explains Haugen. “Facebook is struggling with itself, they are hiding information. We cannot solve problems alone, but together ”, he admits, referring to the rest of society.
Haugen is the face, until now hidden, behind the biggest crisis of the social network since Cambridge Analytica. Some say that this crisis is deeper because they are internal documents of the network on which the company has decided not to act, where it is seen that how Instagram is bad for groups of adolescent girls or that the algorithm rewards hatred because it is more attractive and it achieves more interactions from users, which means they spend more time on the platform. “They have found that if they change the algorithm to be more secure, people will spend less time on the platform, click on fewer ads, make less money,” says Haugen.
Together we can create social media that brings out the best in us. We solve problems together – we don’t solve them alone.
– Frances Haugen (@FrancesHaugen_) October 4, 2021
“Facebook chooses benefits over security. Finance your benefits with our security ”, he insists. During the long interview, Haugen repeats that within the company there are many people who admit and acknowledge these problems, but their incentives are misaligned: what makes money is bad for society. “I have a lot of empathy for Mark [Zuckerberg]. It never started to end up creating a hate platform, but it has allowed decisions to be made whose secondary consequences are that hateful content reaches more people, ”he says.
One of the big concerns for Haugen, like other former employees who have recently left, is the havoc Facebook wreaks in non-Western countries. “What Facebook does in other countries is horrible,” says Haugen. “Most of the world’s languages do not have a free and open internet and Facebook has gone to pay and subsidize with data plans in some countries with a very fragile structure for them to use the platform. We had a joke within the company: If you want to know which countries will be in crisis in a couple of years, look at where we have expanded, ”says Haugen.
“The black humor behind the joke is that information technologies are not neutral,” he clarifies. Haugen then explains another of the places where Facebook has its incentives misaligned with the interests of the societies where it arrives. “Every time Facebook expands into a new linguistic area, it costs the same or more to create the security systems that English or French already have. Each language costs more money but there are fewer customers. The accounts don’t add up. So if there are 5,000 languages in the world, Facebook has its systems adapted to maybe 50. In all the places where there are not, misinformation leads directly to people dying ”, he explains.
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