First of three parts
Frances Haugen said in her time working with Facebook she saw, “conflicts of interest between what was good for the public and what was good for Facebook,” according to Scott Pelley’s report on a recent CBS 60 Minutes show.
“Scott Pelley: ‘Her name is Frances Haugen. That is a fact that Facebook has been anxious to know since last month when an anonymous former employee filed complaints with federal law enforcement. The complaints say Facebook’s own research shows that it amplifies hate, misinformation, and political unrest, but the Company hides what it knows. One complaint alleges that Facebook’s Instagram harms teenage girls. What makes Haugen’s complaints unprecedented is the trove of private Facebook research she took when she quit in May. The documents appeared first, last month, in the Wall Street Journal. But tonight, Frances Haugen is revealing her identity to explain why she became the Facebook whistleblower.’
“Facebook’s response to 60 Minutes’
report, ‘The Facebook Whistleblower’
“Facebook whistleblower says company incentivizes ‘angry, polarizing, divisive content.’
“Watch Live: Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen testifies before Senate committee:
“Frances Haugen: ‘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.’
“Scott Pelley: ‘Frances Haugen is 37, a data scientist from Iowa with a degree in computer engineering and a Harvard master’s degree in business. For 15 years she’s worked for companies including Google and Pinterest.’
“Frances Haugen: ‘I’ve seen a bunch of social networks and it was substantially worse at Facebook than anything I’d seen before.’
“Scott Pelley: ‘You know, someone else might have just quit and moved on. And I wonder why you take this stand.’
“Frances Haugen: Imagine you know what’s going on inside of Facebook and you know no one on the outside knows. I knew what my future looked like if I continued to stay inside of Facebook, which is person after person after person has tackled this inside of Facebook and ground themselves to the ground.’
“Scott Pelley: ‘When and how did it occur to you to take all of these documents out of the company?’
“Frances Haugen: ‘At some point in 2021, I realized, “Okay, I’m gonna have to do this in a systemic way, and I have to get out enough that no one can question that this is real.’
“Scott Pelley ‘Haugen, secretly copied tens of thousands of pages of Facebook internal research. She says evidence shows that the company is lying to the public about making significant progress against hate, violence, and misinformation. One study she found, from this year, says, ‘we estimate that we may action as little as 3-5% of hate and about sixth-tenths of one percent of V & I [violence and incitement] on Facebook despite being the best in the world at it.’
‘Scott Pelley: ‘To quote from another one of the documents you brought out, “We have evidence from a variety of sources that hate speech, divisive political speech and misinformation on Facebook and the family of apps are affecting societies around the world.’
“Frances Haugen: ‘When we live in an information environment that is full of angry, hateful, polarizing content it erodes our civic trust, it erodes our faith in each other, it erodes our ability to want to care for each other, the version of Facebook that exists today is tearing our societies apart and causing ethnic violence around the world.’
“Scott Pelley: ‘Ethnic violence, including Myanmar in 2018 when the military used Facebook to launch a genocide.
“Haugen told us she was recruited by Facebook in 2019. She says she agreed to take the job only if she could work against misinformation because she had lost a friend to online conspiracy theories.’
“Frances Haugen: ‘I never wanted anyone to feel the pain that I had felt. And I had seen how high the stakes were in terms of making sure there was high quality information on Facebook.’
“Scott Pelley: ‘At headquarters, she was assigned to Civic Integrity which worked on risks to elections including misinformation. But after this past election, there was a turning point.
“Frances Haugen: 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.’
“Scott Pelley: ‘Facebook says the work of Civic Integrity was distributed to other units. Haugen told us the root of Facebook’s problem is in a change that it made in 2018 to its algorithms, the programming that decides what you see on your Facebook news feed.’
“Frances Haugen: ‘So, you know, you have your phone. You might see only 100 pieces of content if you sit and scroll on for, you know, five minutes. But Facebook has thousands of options it could show you.
“‘The algorithm picks from those options based on the kind of content you’ve engaged with the most in the past.’”
Continued at https://thevoice.us/facebook-prioritized-growth-over-safety-60-minutes