Facebook Whistle-Blower Urges Lawmakers to Regulate the Company

In addition to promoting harmful, hyper-engaging content in the United States, Facebook’s engagement-based ranking system is “literally fanning ethnic violence” in places like Ethiopia, she said.

Ms. Haugen also criticized Facebook’s focus on technology tools to detect vaccine and other misinformation. Facebook is “overly reliant on artificial intelligence systems that they themselves say will likely never get more than 10 to 20 percent of the content,” she said.

Several senators excoriated Mr. Zuckerberg for making decisions that eschewed safety and privacy. He approved of promoting posts that generated the most engagement.

“So here’s my message for Mark Zuckerberg: Your time of invading our privacy, promoting toxic content and preying on children and teens is over,” said Senator Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts.

Mr. Blumenthal said after the hearing, “Facebook is a black box, and Mark Zuckerberg is the algorithm designer in chief.”

Ms. Haugen studied electrical and computer engineering at Olin College and got a master of business administration degree from Harvard. She then worked at Silicon Valley companies including Google, Pinterest and Yelp. She left Facebook after nearly two years working on the civic misinformation team, which dealt with issues related to democracy and misinformation, and later on countering efforts by foreign governments to abuse the platform.

At Facebook, Ms. Haugen said, she noticed a pattern of the company’s choosing to ignore warnings of harm done by its service. The final straw came in December when the company disbanded her group that was charged with stopping the spread of misinformation.

“It really felt like a betrayal,” Ms. Haugen said.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/05/technology/facebook-whistle-blower-hearing.html