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Facebook’s
former employee Frances Haugen, in an interview
on “60 Minutes,”
explained to host Scott Pelley that the social media giant has
conducted
internal experiments
that demonstrate just how quickly and efficiently its users are
driven down rabbit holes of white supremacist beliefs.
The
37-year-old data scientist who resigned from Facebook earlier this
year and became a whistleblower explained how the company knows its
algorithms lead users down extremist paths. Facebook, according to
Haugen, created new test accounts that followed former President
Donald Trump, his wife Melania Trump, Fox News and a local news
outlet. After simply clicking on the first suggested links that
Facebook’s algorithm offered up, those accounts were then
automatically shown white supremacist content. “Within a week
you see QAnon; in two weeks you see things about ‘white
genocide,’” said Haugen.
Haugen’s
testimony and the documents she shared confirm what critics have
known for a long time. “We’ve already known that hate
speech, bigotry, lies about COVID, about the pandemic, about the
election, about a number of other issues, are prolific across
Facebook’s platforms,” said Jessica González,
co-CEO of Free
Press,
in an interview.
However, “what we didn’t know is the extent of what
Facebook knew,” she added.
Three
and a half years ago, in the midst of the Trump presidency, I wrote
about giving
up on an older white man
related to me via marriage and who, generally speaking, has been a
loving and kind parent and grandparent to his nonwhite relatives.
This man’s hate-filled and lie-filled Facebook reposts
alienated me so deeply that I cut off ties with him. In light of
Haugen’s testimony, the trajectory of hate that he followed
makes far more sense to me now than it did in 2018. Active on
Facebook, he constantly reposted memes and fake news posts that he
likely didn’t seek out but that he was exposed to.
I
imagine such content resonated with some nascent sense of outrage he
harbored over fears that immigrants and people of color were taking
advantage of a system that was rigged against whites by Black and
Brown politicians like Barack Obama and Ilhan Omar. My relative fit
the profile of the thousands of right-wing white Americans who mobbed
the Capitol building on January 6, 2021, egged on by a sense of
outrage that Facebook helped whip up.
In
fact, Haugen related that Facebook turned off its tools to stem
election misinformation soon after the November 2020 election—a
move that she says the company’s employees cited internally as
a significant contributor to the January 6 riot in the nation’s
capital. The House Select Committee investigating the riot has now
invited
Haugen to meet with members
about Facebook’s role.
Facebook
founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg understands exactly what Haugen
blames his company for, saying
in a lengthy post,
“At the heart of these accusations is this idea that we
prioritize profit over safety and well-being.” Of course, he
maintains, “That’s just not true,” and goes on to
call her analysis “illogical,” and that it is a “false
picture of the company that is being painted.”
Except
that Haugen isn’t just sharing her opinions
of the company’s motives and practices. She has a massive trove
of internal documents from Facebook to back up her claims—documents
that were analyzed and published in an in-depth
investigation
in the Wall Street Journal, hardly a marginal media outlet.
The
Wall Street Journal says that its “central finding” is
that “Facebook Inc. knows, in acute detail, that its platforms
are riddled with flaws that cause harm, often in ways only the
company fully understands.”
The
crux of Facebook’s defense against such accusations is that it
does its best to combat misinformation while balancing the need to
protect free speech and that if it were to crack down anymore, it
would violate the First Amendment rights of users. In his testimony
before House Representatives this March, Zuckerberg said,
“It’s not possible to catch every piece of harmful
content without infringing on people’s freedoms in a way that I
don’t think that we’d be comfortable with as a society.”
In
other words, the social media platform maintains that it is doing as
much as it possibly can to combat hate speech, misinformation, and
fake news on its platform. One might imagine that this means a
majority of material is being flagged and removed. But Haugen
maintains that while Facebook says it removes 94 percent of hate
speech, its “internal documents say we get 3 percent to 5
percent of hate speech.” Ultimately, “Facebook makes more
money when you consume more content,” she explained.
And hate and rage are great motivators for keeping people engaged on
the platform.
Based
on what Haugen has revealed, González concluded
that “Facebook had a very clear picture about the major
societal harms that its platform was causing.” And, worse, the
company “largely decided to do nothing to mitigate those
problems, and then it proceeded to lie and mislead the U.S. public,
including members of Congress.”
González
is hopeful that Haugen’s decision to become a whistleblower
will have a positive impact on an issue that has stymied Congress.
During Haugen’s testimony to a Senate panel on October 5, she
faced largely reasonable and thoughtful questioning from lawmakers
with little of the partisan political grandstanding that has marked
many hearings on social media-based misinformation. “We saw
senators from both sides of the aisle asking serious questions,”
she said. “It was much less of a circus than we usually see in
the United States Senate.”
What
González hopes is that Congress passes a data privacy law that
treats the protection of data gathered from users as a civil right.
This is critical because Facebook makes its money from selling user
data to advertisers, and González wants to see that “our
personal data and the personal data of our children isn’t used
to push damaging content… that doesn’t provoke hate and
violence and spread massive amounts of lies.”
The
calculus of Facebook's intent is very simple. In spite of
Zuckerberg's denials, González says, "the system is built
on a hate-and-lie for-profit model, and Facebook has made a decision
that it would rather make money than keep people safe." It isn't
as though Facebook is selling hate because it has an agenda to
destroy democracy. It's just that destroying democracy is not a
deal-breaker when huge profits are at stake.
This article was produced by Economy
for All,
a project of the Independent Media
Institute.
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