Who is Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen?
The Wall Street Journal has published a series of stories in recent weeks accusing Facebook of allowing hate speech to flourish on its platform and ignoring the safety of minors on Instagram.
These stories were based on internal papers obtained by the Wall Street Journal.
Frances Haugen, the whistleblower behind the document leaks,
appeared on 60 Minutes today to discuss why she chose to expose some of Facebook’s secrets.
Haugen, 37, is an Iowa-based data scientist with a bachelor’s degree in computer science and a master’s degree in business administration.
She served as a product manager for Facebook’s Civic Integrity division,
which focused on election risks such as disinformation.
She has worked at companies such as Google, Yelp,
and Pinterest before joining the social media behemoth.
After the Civic Integrity group was disbanded in May, she quit her position.
She did, however, copy thousands of papers before departing,
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which she later disclosed to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Wall Street Journal (WSJ).
According to the New York Times, she also worked with Whistleblower Aid,
a legal organization that assists individuals seeking to disclose possible wrongdoings.
During the interview, Haugen said that it was “significantly worse at Facebook than anything I’d seen previously” when she first joined the business.
Despite professing to be the greatest at it, according to one of the papers she stole,
Facebook only takes action on 3-5 percent of hatred and 0.6 percent of violence and incitement material.
She also said that Facebook is causing societal divisions and that material on the site may lead to violence:
When we live in an information environment filled with furious, nasty,
divisive material, it erodes our civic trust, our confidence in one another,
and our capacity to care for one another. The current version of Facebook is ripping our communities apart and creating ethnic bloodshed across the globe.
Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook put out an algorithm update in 2018 with the goal of increasing connections between friends and family.
According to Haugen, this shift is at the core of the social network’s current difficulties.
She said that Facebook does not use safer algorithms in order to encourage users to spend more time on the site. According to Haugen,
the firm put on certain security measures for the 2020 US Presidential elections but then turned them off after the elections were finished.
Prior to Haugen’s interview, Nick Clegg, Facebook’s VP of Global Affairs,
spoke on CNN’s Reliable Sources and stated it’s absurd to believe that social media was to blame for the January Capitol Riots.
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