Words: Tom Ward
Things aren’t looking good for Facebook. Perhaps that’s an understatement. According to a series of investigations carried out by the Wall Street Journal:
“Facebook Inc. knows, in acute detail, that its platforms are riddled with flaws that cause harm, often in ways only the company fully understands. That is the central finding of a Wall Street Journal series, based on a review of internal Facebook documents, including research reports, online employee discussions and drafts of presentations to senior management.”
Which sounds – and is – terrible. But it’s nothing the company hasn’t tried to sort out, right? Well herein lies the problem. As the Journal report continues:
“Time and again, the documents show, Facebook’s researchers have identified the platform’s ill effects. Time and again, despite congressional hearings, its own pledges and numerous media exposés, the company didn’t fix them. The documents offer perhaps the clearest picture thus far of how broadly Facebook’s problems are known inside the company, up to the chief executive himself.”
Backed by documents provided by whistleblower Frances Haugen, the report found Facebook’s impact was particularly troubling for teenage girls, with Instagram (owned by Facebook) found to be harmful for a sizeable percentage of teenagers, particularly when it comes to their mental health.
Frances Haugen, the whistleblower at the heart of the story
Meanwhile, other documents examined by the Journal found Facebook employees had repeatedly flagged concerns over how the platform is used in developing countries, especially in regard to drug smuggling, human trafficking (“Employees flagged that human traffickers in the Middle East used the site to lure women into abusive employment situations”), inciting violence against ethnic minorities, organ selling, pornography, and government action against political dissent. According to the Journal report, the documents they have obtained “also show the company’s response, which in many instances is inadequate or nothing at all.”
The report also found Facebook allowed the spread of inaccurate information to go unchecked.
Add this to the outage that sunk Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and more earlier this month thanks to the loss of IP routes to the Facebook Domain Name System (DNS) servers and there’s plenty of reasons to be angry. Indeed, Wired recently published an article titled “How to Permanently Delete Your Facebook Account – If you’ve finally hit your breaking point, here’s how to say goodbye to Mark Zuckerberg’s empire.”
This isn’t the first time the social network has come under fire – and with Haugen set to testify against Facebook in the US and possibly elsewhere, the saga is far from over. But will this be the scandal that finally sinks Zuckerberg’s empire, or simply just another batch of negative headlines to ride out?
Thumbs up? Things have rarely looked less rosy for Facebook
A former Facebook product manager, Frances Haugen revealed herself to be the whistleblower behind The Wall Street Journal‘s Facebook Files at the beginning of October, appearing on US talkshow 60 Minutes Sunday.
Haugen – who will testify before US Congress on October 18th – had gathered documents from Facebook’s internal messaging system Workplace before resigning from the company in April. Among the treasure trove of findings were attorney-client-privilege documents and presentations for Zuckerberg himself as well as research notes. That Haugen, or as she explains any of the company’s 60,000 employees, could have found such sensitive data certainly seems like a security oversight.
Thanks to Haugen’s actions, US Senate commerce committee chair Maria Cantwell has called on Mark Zuckerberg to preserve all documents related to Haugen’s testimony.
“I don’t hate Facebook,” Haugen wrote into the search bar on her last day logging into the platform. “I love Facebook. I want to save it.”
Haugen, who has also worked with Yelp and Google and is a co-founder of Hinge, has been particularly vocal about the site’s impact on teenage girls. “What’s super tragic is Facebook’s own research says as these young women begin to consume this eating-disorder content they get more and more depressed, and it actually makes them use the app more,” Haugen explained in her 60 Minutes interview, going on to explain that Facebook’s own internal research clearly showed that Instagram is “distinctly worse than other forms of social media.”
Another mystifying and infuriating talking point was the face that Facebook reportedly “dissolved”
its civic integrity team in the wake of the 2020 election. “Fast forward a couple months, we got an insurrection,” Haugen said. “When they got rid of civic integrity, it was the moment I was like: I don’t trust they’re actually willing to invest what needs to be invested to keep Facebook from being dangerous.”
Pre-empting Haugen’s interview, Facebook’s vice president of global affairs, Nick Clegg (yes, unfortunately, the same Nick Clegg who sunk the Liberal Democrats in 2010) released an internal memo downplaying some of the allegations. (The memo has been obtained by the New York Times).
Clegg added to this by stating that the social media firm would introduce new features to encourage teens to take a break from prolonged exposure as well as encouraging them away from harmful content. Vaguely, Clegg promised that Facebook will also implement new tools to limit political content and give parents more control on teen Instagram accounts.
“We have no commercial incentive to do anything other than try and make sure that the experience is positive,” Clegg said. “We can’t change human nature. We always see bad things online. We can do everything we can to try to reduce and mitigate them.”
Clegg’s underwhelming response aside, this isn’t even the first harmful leak about Facebook. Far from it. As recently as 2018 it was revealed that 50 million Facebook profiles were harvested for Cambridge Analytica in a major and unprecedented data breach. At that time, whistleblower Christopher Wylie revealed to the Observer how the company used personal information taken without authorisation to build a system that could profile individual US voters, with the aim of targeting them with personalised political advertisements.
“We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profiles. And built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons,” Wylie said. “That was the basis the entire company was built on.”
This time around, the storm might be more difficult for Zuckerberg and Co to weather; as well as appearing before the US Congress, Haugen is also set to give evidence before the British Parliament on the 25 of October. What’s more, it was announced on October 14th that a second whistleblower, Sophie Zhang, (a former data scientist who says she was fired by the company after highlighting its alleged failure to combat election interference in Honduras) will also appear before parliament.
Is Nick Clegg sitting on the wrong side of history?
Damian Collins, MP and chair of the joint committee on the government’s Online Safety Bill previously took Facebook to task over the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal. “There needs to be greater transparency on the decisions companies like Facebook take when they trade off user safety for user engagement,” he said in response to the latest revelations about the company.
The U.K. government is now set to introduce legislation imposing a duty of care on tech corporations to take action against illegal or harmful material online with failure to do so resulting in either fines of 10 percent of annual global revenue, or £18 million.
Haugen’s revelations have spread beyond the US and UK, too; EU lawmakers have recently invited her to appearing at a hearing in November. The EU’s Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act aims to remove toxic content and reduce monopolies in tech.
“Whistleblowers like Frances Haugen show the urgent need to set democratic rules for the online world in the interest of users,” Anna Cavazzini, chair of the European Parliament’s internal market and consumer protection committee, has said. “Her revelations lay bare the inherent conflict between the platform’s business model and users’ interests.”
The future is uncertain, but with lawmakers closing in, Facebook will have to go far beyond a token gesture of change if it wants to survive.
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