Facebook would accept hatred or ethnic violence and thereby amplify and spread it.
Former Facebook employee and whistleblower Frances Haugen has testified before a British parliamentary committee examining online safety legislation.
Mark Zuckerberg has “unilateral control over 3 billion people” because of his unassailable position at the helm of Facebook, whistleblower Frances Haugen told MPs. She called for urgent external regulation to rein in the tech company's management and reduce harm to society.
Haugen, a former Facebook employee who published tens of thousands of damaging documents about the company's inner workings, traveled from the US to a parliamentary hearing in London and backed the British government's proposals to regulate social media platforms and force them to to assume a certain responsibility for the content on their pages.
The company's internal culture prioritizes profitability over impact on the world, Haugen said, and there is a lack of will at the top to ensure that these systems are operated safely in an appropriate manner. She added:
“Unless we provide a counterbalance, these things will be done in the interests of shareholders and not in the interests of the public.”
She warned that Instagram, which is owned by Facebook and used by millions of children worldwide, may never be safe for preschoolers.
Addressing a group of MPs and colleagues on Monday 10/25/21, Haugen said much of the blame for the world's increasingly polarized politics lay with social networks and the radicalizing effect of services such as Facebook groups.
These can foster small and intense communities that spawn conspiracy theories, she said.
“I am deeply concerned that they have created a product that can lead people away from their real communities and isolate them in these rabbit holes and filter bubbles. If you send people targeted misinformation to a community, it can make it harder to reintegrate into society because you no longer have common facts.”
Amid growing concerns about Instagram's impact on teens' mental health and body image, Haugen said Facebook's own research compares the app's young users to addicts who feel unable to break away from a service that addicts them makes 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's just so much worse. She claimed the company's own research found Instagram was more dangerous than other social media like TikTok and Snapchat because the platform focuses on "social comparisons about bodies, about people's lifestyles, and that's what ends up happening." is worse for children.”
She added:
“I am deeply concerned that it may not be possible to make Instagram safe for a 14-year-old, and I seriously doubt that it is possible to make it safe for a 10-year-old.”
Frances Haugen calls on Facebook...
The whistleblower also called on Facebook to make it harder to share material to slow the sharing of hate and disinformation while pushing more content from family and friends into users' news feeds:
“The safest way to design social media is to move to systems that are tailored to people. We liked social media before we had an algorithmic feed.”
One of their particular concerns is how Facebook can fool the public into believing it is prioritizing combating disinformation outside the English-speaking world, while highlighting its impact on societal divisions in Myanmar and Ethiopia. She suggested that tools developed to mitigate harm in English-language posts may be less effective in the UK because they were developed in American English.
Facebook's ownership is structured in such a way that Zuckerberg, as the company's founder, owns a special class of shares that means he alone controls the company. This gives him enormous control over the social network of the same name as well as Facebook-owned Instagram and WhatsApp.
Haugen said the company was full of "good, kind, conscientious people ," but they operated with poor incentives set by management and the requirement to maximize financial returns for shareholders. “Facebook was unwilling to accept that even a small portion of profits would be sacrificed for security. And that is unacceptable.”
She said there was little incentive within the company to fix mistakes and deal with the side effects of its business model.
“Facebook has never set out to favor polarizing and critical content; it was simply a side effect of the decisions they made.”
In a conference call with investors on Monday, Zuckerberg addressed the document but did not directly address its contents. He said that the problems facing the company are not primarily related to social media, but rather to the polarization that began in the United States before I was born.
"In my opinion, what we are seeing is a coordinated attempt to selectively use leaked documents to paint a false picture about our company," he added, as the company reported a quarterly profit of $9 billion.
A Facebook spokesperson said:
“At the core of these stories is a premise that is false. Yes, we are a business and we make a profit, but the idea that we do this at the expense of people's safety or well-being ignores where our own commercial interests lie. The truth is, we have invested $13 billion and have over 40,000 employees to do one job: keep people safe on Facebook.”
Sources:
The Facebook Papers: An Anthology
The Facebook Papers
The NewYorkTimes
The Guardian
The Associated Press
In keeping with the topic: Frustrated Facebook whistleblower reveals herself
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