Facebook whistleblower makes case for social media curbs to UK parliament

Facebook has lurched from controversy to controversy since Mark Zuckerberg started it as a Harvard undergrad in 2004. But the actions of Frances Haugen, a former product manager, have created a backlash and public relations crisis that stand apart.

On Monday, she took her tightly choreographed campaign to build a case for stiffer oversight of the social media giant to Europe. In front of British lawmakers Monday, painting a portrait of a company vividly aware of its harmful effects on society but unwilling to act because doing so could jeopardise profits and growth.

Hours before she began speaking in London, more than a dozen news organisations published articles based on the Facebook Papers, a cache of documents she took before resigning from the company.

“We need regulation,” Haugen said Tuesday. “Until the incentives change, Facebook will not change,” she added later.

Facebook on Monday said profits in the latest quarter, which ended in September, had risen 17% to $9.2 billion, reflecting the company’s financial strength.

Also read: Embattled Facebook's quarterly profit climbs to over $9 billion

The revelations from Haugen have generated increased political support for new regulation in the United States and Europe, including some calls for Zuckerberg to step aside as Facebook’s CEO, putting Facebook on the defensive. The growing rancour could lead to new government investigations and force the company to disclose more details about how its software works.

“Facebook is failing to prevent harm to children, it’s failing to stop the spread of disinformation, it is failing to stop the spread of hate speech,” John Nicolson, a lawmaker from Scotland, said during the hearing Monday. “It does have the power to deal with these issues, it’s just choosing not to.”

Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., said that the news coverage based on the Facebook Papers “resoundingly adds to the drumbeat of calls for reform, rules to protect teens, and real transparency and accountability from Facebook and its Big Tech peers.”

Haugen left Facebook with scores of internal research papers, slide decks, discussion threads, presentations and memos that she has shared with lawmakers, regulators and journalists. The information provides an unvarnished view of how some within the company tried to raise alarms about its harmful effects, but often struggled to get Facebook leaders to act.

After leaking internal company documents to The Wall Street Journal that resulted in a series of articles that began in September, Haugen revealed her identity this month for an episode of “60 Minutes” and testified before a Senate committee. She also shared the documents with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Since then, she has shared the Facebook materials with other news organisations, including The New York Times, resulting in additional articles about Facebook’s harmful effects, including its role in spreading election misinformation in the United States and stoking divisions in countries such as India.

During a call with financial analysts Monday, Zuckerberg strongly criticised the news coverage and criticism stemming from Haugen’s leaks.

“My view on what we are seeing is a coordinated effort to selectively use leaked documents to create a false picture about our company,” he said.

“Any honest account should be clear that these issues aren’t just about social media,” he added. “That means that whatever Facebook does, we’re never going to solve them alone.”

Mitch Henderson, a company spokesperson, defended Facebook’s practices and said it had spent $13 billion and hired 40,000 people to work on safety issues.

“Contrary to what was discussed at the hearing, we’ve always had the commercial incentive to remove harmful content from our sites,” he said. “People don’t want to see it when they use our apps and advertisers don’t want their ads next to it.”

Haugen’s visit to Europe is a reflection of the region’s aggressive approach to tech regulation and a belief that its policymakers are expected to act faster than the United States to pass new laws aiming at Facebook and other tech giants. In the coming weeks, Haugen has additional meetings with officials in France, Germany and the European Union about new laws that she said were necessary to force Facebook to recalibrate how it measures success more toward the public good.

“For all the problems Frances Haugen is trying to solve, Europe is the place to be,” said Mathias Vermeulen, the public policy director at AWO, a law firm and policy firm that is among the groups working with Haugen in the United States and Europe.

In London, Haugen told policymakers that regulation could offset Facebook’s corporate culture that rewards ideas that get people to spend more time scrolling their social media feeds, but views safety issues as a less important “cost center.”

Also read: Facebook will fuel further unrest, whistleblower says

Facebook’s influence is particularly strong in areas of Africa, Asia and the Middle East where its services are popular. But the company does not have language or cultural expertise there, Haugen said. Without government intervention, she told lawmakers, events in countries such as Ethiopia and Myanmar, where Facebook has been accused of contributing to ethnic violence, are the “opening chapters of a novel that is going to be horrific to read.”

She suggested policies that would require Facebook to perform annual risk assessments to identify areas where its product were causing harm — such as the spread of coronavirus misinformation, or harms to teenagers’ mental health. She said Facebook could be required to outline specific solutions and share the findings with outside researchers and auditors to be sure they are sufficient.

Without government-mandated transparency, Facebook can present a false picture of its efforts to address hate speech and other extreme content, she said. The company says artificial intelligence software catches more than 90% of hate speech, but Haugen said the number was less than 5%.

“They are very good at dancing with data,” she said.

British policymakers are drafting a law to create a new internet regulator that could impose billions of dollars' worth of fines if more isn’t done to stop the spread of hate speech, misinformation, racist abuse and harmful content targeting children.

The policy ideas gained momentum after the murder this month of David Amess, a member of Parliament, leading to calls for the law to force social media companies to crack down on extremism.

In Brussels, Haugen is scheduled to meet on Nov. 8 with European Union officials drafting laws that would force Facebook and other large internet platforms to disclose more about how their recommendation algorithms choose to promote certain material over others, and impose tougher antitrust rules to prevent the companies from using their dominant positions to box out smaller rivals. European policymakers are also debating a ban on targeted advertising based on a person’s data profile, which would pose a grave threat to Facebook’s multibillion-dollar advertising business.

Despite growing political support for new regulation, many questions remain about how such policies would work in practice. Any new laws in Britain and the European Union are not expected to be passed until next year at the earliest. In the United States, lawmakers are focusing on the harmful effect of Facebook and other social media platforms have on children.

Regulating Facebook is particularly complex because many of its biggest problems center on content posted by users all over the world, raising difficult questions about the regulation of speech and free expression. In Britain, the new online safety law has been criticized by some civil society groups as being overly restrictive and a threat to free speech online.

Another challenge is how to enforce the new rules, particularly at a time when many government agencies are under pressure to tighten spending.