All the information published in recent weeks by The Wall Street Journal about Facebook has sparked a great controversy around how the company operates. Now, the former Facebook employee who decided to leak these documents to the aforementioned newspaper, has decided to show her face in an interview in which she reveals even more shocking data about the company. Your name? Frances Haugen.
Haugen worked at Facebook as a Product Manager in the Civil Integrity Team until mid-2021, when he resigned after Mark Zuckerberg's company decided to dissolve that department.
In the 60-minute interview, the former employee assures, among other things, that the company always had “conflicts of interest between what was good for the public and what was good for Facebook itself.” However, they always opted for “their own interests, such as making more money” .
The algorithm of the social network tends to show content that incites hatred
Haugen also highlighted, citing internal reports, that the company's algorithm – the one that decides what appears in each user's feed – tends to show Fake News and content related to hate speech . Facebook, thanks to its own research, is aware of it, but does nothing to prevent it because it is more beneficial.
Their algorithms show content that inspires hatred, division and polarization because it is easier to provoke anger in people than to inspire other emotions. Facebook has found that if it changes its algorithm to make it more secure, people will spend less time on the page, click on fewer ads, and therefore generate less revenue.
Misinformation or the spread of hoaxes is also more common in non-English speaking regions. Haugen assures that Facebook “does not bother” to hire researchers in other countries to combat fake news written in other languages, and that the company has always acted as if it was “impossible to expand This teams”. In some cases, Haugen explained, this lack of control over misinformation has even caused people to die.
According to the former Facebook employee, different European political parties also disagreed with the new algorithm. These, it seems, forced to adopt more extreme political positions for the platform to show its content.
You are forcing us to take positions that we don't like, that we know are bad for society. We know that if we do not take those positions, we will not win in the social media market.
Frances Haugen confirms, citing one of the sources from the political sector in Europe.
Facebook hardly manages to identify 5% of hate content and dissolves departments focused on it
The former employee of the company has worked in companies such as Pinterest or Google, however, she assures that what she has seen on Facebook has been “substantially worse” than in other companies related to networks social. Haugen has also revealed that internal documentation confirms that the social network only manages to identify 3 or 5% of the content that incites hatred. While it only controls 1% of the content that incites violence.
Despite the worrying data, Facebook decided to dissolve the department called “Civic Integrity”. This focused on the fight against misinformation about the 2020 elections, but stopped working after verifying that they passed normally. Months later, after the conflict in the Capitol, the former Facebook employee revealed that some employees showed their anger at the company for allowing, in a way, the social network to serve as a portal for coordinate the assault on the Capitol.
Haugen has also spoken about the dangers of social media for teens. Specifically, on how Facebook knows that Instagram is harmful to young women. Again, he cites internal studies that detail that 13.5% of teenagers who view content on Instagram said it makes thoughts of suicide worse. In addition, 17% of the adolescents assured that the content affects eating disorders.
