Oct. 5, 2021
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Facebook whistleblower and former Facebook product manager Frances Haugen testifies before a Senate subcommittee about Facebook's handling of data of children and other users. For access to live and exclusive video from CNBC subscribe to CNBC PRO: https://cnb.cx/2NGeIvi Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen told a Senate panel Tuesday that Congress must intervene to solve the “crisis” created by her former employer’s products. The former Facebook product manager for civic misinformation told lawmakers that Facebook consistently puts its own profits over users’ health and safety, which is largely a result of its algorithms’ design that steers users toward high-engagement posts that in some cases can be more harmful.
Though she stopped short of accusing top executives of intentionally creating harmful products, she said that ultimately CEO Mark Zuckerberg had to be responsible for the impact of his business. Haugen also said that Facebook’s algorithm could steer young users from something relatively innocuous such as healthy recipes to content promoting anorexia in a short period of time. She proposed a solution for Facebook to change its algorithms to stop focusing on delivering posts that create more engagement and instead create a chronological feed of posts for Facebook users. That, she said, would help Facebook deliver safer content.
Haugen, who unmasked herself Sunday as the source behind leaked documents at the core of a revealing Wall Street Journal series about Facebook, testified before the Senate Commerce subcommittee on consumer protection. Haugen told CBS’ “60 Minutes” in an interview aired this weekend that the problems she saw at Facebook were worse than anywhere else she’d worked, which includes Google, Yelp and Pinterest. She told the news program that she copied tens of thousands of pages of internal research that she took with her when she left Facebook in May. “I saw that Facebook repeatedly encountered conflicts between its own profits and our safety,” Haugen said in her written testimony. “Facebook consistently resolved those conflicts in favor of its own profits. The result has been a system that amplifies division, extremism and polarization — and undermining societies around the world.”
In her prepared remarks, Haugen said she believes she did the right thing in coming forward but is aware Facebook could use its immense resources to “destroy” her. “I came forward because I recognized a frightening truth: almost no one outside of Facebook knows what happens inside Facebook,” Haugen said in her written remarks. “The company’s leadership keeps vital information from the public, the U.S. government, its shareholders, and governments around the world.” Haugen said a turning point that convinced her of the need to bring information outside Facebook was when the company dissolved the civic integrity team after the 2020 U.S. election. Facebook said it would integrate those responsibilities into other parts of the company. But Haugen said that within six months of the reorganization, 75% of her “pod” of seven people who had mostly come from civic integrity left for other parts of the company or left entirely. “Six months after the reorganization, we had clearly lost faith that those changes were coming,” she said.
In a statement after the hearing concluded, a Facebook spokesperson attempted to cast doubt on Haugen’s credibility.
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