“Reporting Facebook’s wrongdoing wasn’t the hardest thing I’ve done. People generally tell themselves a thousand reasons why they can’t do what they really want or should do. They are afraid of losing their job, their well-being, of finding themselves sun. It wasn’t my case: it had already happened to me to lose everything”. Frances Haugen, on the threshold of forty, speaks thus of her decision that she made her famous. Born in Iowa, with a degree in computer science and a master’s degree from Harvard, in 2021 she published 22,000 pages of internal documents of the social network co-founded by Mark Zuckerberg, causing parliamentary questions, investigations and a six billion dollar stock market crash. Of the “Facebook files”, which first appeared on the Wall Street Journalhis essay deals only in part. The duty to choose, my battle for the truth against Facebook, which comes out today in Italy for Garzanti, is actually an autobiography that embraces a much wider period and not always so relevant moments. Limit or value is a matter of point of view, considering that Haugen, in addition to having gone through difficult times, worked for companies such as Yelp, Pinterest and Google before moving to Facebook, now called Meta.
Whistleblower Frances Haugen has suggested that Zuckerberg step aside
“I was in the civic disinformation department and then in the counterintelligence department that was in charge of identifying those who try to circumvent the rules and content moderation,” she explains. “A medium-high grade product manager, sixth level out of a total of seven. When I arrived in 2019, everyone had been aware for at least a year that we had gone from simply trying to keep users for as long as possible on Facebook or Instagram to riding extreme content capable of provoking emotional reactions and a consequent surge in traffic. And hatred and anger are certainly the most effective. This change of direction had occurred between the end of 2017 and the beginning of 2018 in response to a slow decrease in the amount of content produced on the platform”.
But that wasn’t what prompted her to reveal the internal documents.
“No. In general, even before I was hired, the degradation of content had had a perceptible effect on the political debate in the United States and Europe, but in other countries it actually contributed to unleashing violence by pouring petrol where the tension was The first large-scale incident occurred in Myanmar in 2017, in what Amnesty International called a “social atrocity”. The army had established a network of tens of thousands of accounts, pages and groups, managed by a of 700 servicemen to spread and amplify propaganda targeting the Rohingya Muslim minority. He used this network to distribute scary photos, fake news and inflammatory posts, which later became a classic of inciting violence online. I stepped forward. because, in 2021, the second wave of large-scale violence fueled by Facebook had taken shape, this time in Ethiopia. I was convinced, and still am, that the choices made by the company were putting lives in danger.”
Today again?
“A script that can be repeated and has been repeated. When I published the Facebook files, my prediction was that within five years we would see large-scale violence caused by social networks such as TikTok which is based on videos, much more viral than texts. A year later in Kenya there were very violent clashes thanks to political and social tensions exacerbated through TikTok. It has few moderators except in the major languages and content management that people look at even more opaque. I spoke at the time with an employee of the Chinese company who candidly admitted that they didn’t have any Swahili-language moderators.”
What has changed since she left Facebook?
“Many things. Meta announced it would invest more in security and moderation. But with Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter there has been a general regression on this front in social networks. Musk has fired half the staff and run the company without too much attention to the quality of the content and without paying the consequences. I have read many reports recently that show how many platforms are more or less blatantly following this agenda, from YouTube to TikTok. This is why I insist on transparency, it is the only weapon that would really work.”
What do you mean?
“It is impossible to know exactly what is really happening on Facebook, and even more so on other social networks such as TikTok. Beyond the general and often partial statistics that these companies publish, we have no good idea of the real effectiveness, for example, of moderation, which incidentally, it is only done on the major languages starting with English.So you can easily cut funds or personnel for security and control to show off better balance sheets and increase the stock on the stock market without showing what consequences all this has on the company. Let me give you an example: Compulsive use of smartphones probably leads to sleep deprivation in one third of adolescents, with serious consequences for physical and mental health. They stay up until midnight or later to continue checking the phone screen. Inside social media we know exactly how many do it and for how long and in which age groups. Making it public, on a weekly basis, would lead to greater awareness”.
Yet, after the 2016 presidential elections, there seemed to be a will to put a stop to the worst drifts. Then what happened?
“I think at that time they tried to do something. But hi-tech companies lack cultural depth and are guided by people who don’t have an overall vision. They are like sailboats that don’t point in the right direction but only in the one where the wind is stronger and you go faster. You win if the numbers grow, the rest doesn’t count. This is why almost total transparency should be imposed, especially now with the arrival of generative artificial intelligence at ChatGpt which will have a profound impact not only on society but also on the entire production system. Everything risks changing thanks to mechanisms, algorithms, which operate far from our eyes, which come into play starting from a data center and which no one has controlled. Again we need transparency and it’s needed now, also because many brilliant minds who know how to intervene on a social level do not have in-depth knowledge of technology, just as many technology experts fumble their way into other fields”.
Misinformation Monitor How TikTok became a reservoir of misinformation about companies by Jack Brewster and Macrina Wang July 30, 2023
As you explained, what was seen in Myanmar, Ethiopia, Kenya and even on Capitol Hill could repeat itself. Do you think that your revelations, furthermore disputed by Zuckerberg who questioned their validity, have served any purpose?
“I limit myself to pointing out that since then in Europe the Digital Services Act (Dsa) has been passed, the regulation of content in the digital world and the whistleblowing directive which protects and assists those who report crimes. Meanwhile, in the United States, the ‘The Office of Public Health has issued a warning about the dangers of social media as it had about smoking or the need to wear seat belts in the car.’
A last question. What’s the worst thing that happened to her after she made those 22,000 pages of documents public?
“Someone tried to manipulate the entry dedicated to me on Wikipedia”.
That’s all?
“That’s all”.