her name is francis haugen
that is a fact that facebook has been
anxious to know since last month when an
anonymous former employee filed
complaints with federal law enforcement
the complaints say facebook's own
research shows that it amplifies hate
misinformation and political unrest
but the company hides what it knows
one complaint alleges that facebook's
instagram harms teenage girls
what makes haugen's complaints
unprecedented is the trove of private
facebook research she took when she quit
in may
the documents appeared first last month
in the wall street journal but tonight
frances haugen is revealing her identity
to explain why she became the facebook
whistleblower
the story will continue in a moment
the thing i saw at facebook over and
over again was there were conflicts of
interest
between what was good for the public
and what was good for facebook
and facebook over and over again chose
to optimize for its own interests like
making more money
francis haugen is 37 a data scientist
from iowa with a degree in computer
engineering and a harvard master's
degree in business
for 15 years she's worked for companies
including google and pinterest
i've seen a bunch of social networks and
it was substantially worse at facebook
than anything i'd seen before you know
someone else might have just quit and
moved on and i wonder why you take this
stand imagine you know what's going on
inside facebook and you know no one on
the outside knows
i knew what my future looked like if i
continued to stay inside of facebook
which is
person after person after person has
tackled this inside of facebook
and ground themselves to the ground when
and how did it occur to you to take all
of these documents out of the company
at some point in 2021 i realized okay
i'm going to have to do this in a
systemic way and i have to get out
enough that no one can question that
this is real
she secretly copied tens of thousands of
pages of facebook internal research
she says evidence shows that the company
is lying to the public about making
significant progress against hate
violence and misinformation
one study she found from this year
says
we estimate that we may action as little
as three to five percent of hate
and about six tenths of one percent of
violence and incitement on facebook
despite being the best in the world at
it
to quote from another one of the
documents you brought out
we have evidence from a variety of
sources that hate speech divisive
political speech and misinformation on
facebook and the family of apps
are affecting societies
around the world
when we live in an information
environment that is full of angry
hateful polarizing content it erodes our
civic trust
it erodes our faith in each other it
erodes our ability to want to care for
each other the version of facebook that
exists today
is tearing our societies apart and
causing ethnic violence around the world
ethnic violence including myanmar in
2018
when the military used facebook to
launch a genocide
the first quarter of 2019. francis
haugen told us she was recruited by
facebook in 2019
she says she agreed to take the job only
if she could work against
misinformation because she had lost a
friend to online conspiracy theories
i never wanted anyone to feel the pain
that i had felt
and i had seen how
high the stakes were in terms of making
sure there was high quality information
on facebook
at headquarters she was assigned to
civic integrity which worked on risks to
elections including misinformation
but after this past election there was a
turning point
they
told us we're dissolving civic integrity
like they basically said oh good we made
it through the election there wasn't
riots we can get rid of civic integrity
now
fast forward a couple months we got the
insurrection
and
when they got rid of civic integrity it
was the moment where i was like
i don't trust that they're willing to
actually invest what needs to be
invested to keep facebook from being
dangerous
facebook says the work of civic
integrity was distributed to other units
haugen told us the root of facebook's
problem is in a change that it made in
2018 to its algorithms the programming
that decides what you see on your
facebook news feed
so you know you have your phone you
might see only 100 pieces of content if
you sit and scroll off for you know five
minutes
but facebook has thousands of options it
could show you
the algorithm picks from those options
based on the kind of content you've
engaged with the most in the past and
one of the consequences of how facebook
is picking out that content today
is it is optimizing for content that
gets engagement or reaction but its own
research is showing
that content that is hateful that is
divisive that is polarizing
it's easier to inspire people to anger
than it is to other emotions
misinformation angry content
is enticing to people and
keeps them on the platform yes facebook
has realized that
if they change the algorithm to be safer
people will spend less time on the site
they'll click on less ads they'll make
less money
haugen says facebook understood the
danger to the 2020 election so it turned
on safety systems to reduce
but many of those changes she says were
temporary and as soon as the election
was over they turned them back off or
they changed the settings back to what
they were before
to prioritize growth over safety and
that really feels like a betrayal of
democracy to me
facebook says some of the safety systems
remained but after the election facebook
was used by some to organize the january
sixth insurrection
prosecutors cite facebook posts as
evidence
photos of armed partisans and texts
including by bullet or ballot
restoration of the republic is coming
extremists used many platforms but
facebook is a recurring theme
after the attack facebook employees
raged on an internal message board
copied by haugen
haven't we had enough time to figure out
how to manage discourse without enabling
violence
we looked for positive comments and
found this
i don't think our leadership team
ignores data ignores dissent ignores
truth
but that drew this reply
welcome to facebook i see you just
joined in november 2020
we have been watching wishy-washy
actions of company leadership for years
now
colleagues cannot conscience working for
a company that does not do more to
mitigate the negative effects of its
platform
facebook
essentially amplifies the worst of human
nature
it's one of these unfortunate
consequences right no one at facebook is
malevolent but the incentives are
misaligned right like facebook makes
more money
when you consume more content
people enjoy engaging with things that
elicit an emotional reaction
and the more anger that they get exposed
to the more they interact and more they
consume
that dynamic led to a complaint to
facebook by major political parties
across europe
this 2019 internal report obtained by
haugen
says that the parties
feel strongly that the change to the
algorithm has forced them to skew
negative in their communications on
facebook leading them into more extreme
policy positions the european political
parties were essentially saying to
facebook the way you've written your
algorithm is changing
the way we lead our countries yes you
are forcing us to take positions that we
don't like that we know are bad for
society
we know if we don't take those positions
we won't win in the marketplace of
social media
evidence of harm she says
extends to facebook's instagram app
one of the facebook internal studies
that you found talks about how instagram
harms teenage girls oh yeah
one study says 13 and a half percent of
teen girls say instagram makes thoughts
of suicide worse
17 of teen girls say instagram makes
eating disorders worse and 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
and so they end up in this feedback
cycle where they hate their bodies more
and more facebook's own research says
it is not just that instagram is
dangerous for teenagers that it harms
teenagers
it's that it is distinctly worse than
other forms of social media
facebook said just last week
it would postpone plans to create an
instagram for younger children
last month haugen's lawyers filed at
least eight complaints with the
securities and exchange commission which
enforces the law in financial markets
the complaints compare the internal
research with the company's public face
often that of ceo mark zuckerberg here
testifying remotely to congress last
march we removed content that could lead
to imminent real world harm we've built
an unprecedented third-party
fact-checking program
the system isn't perfect but it's the
best approach that we've found to
address misinformation in line with our
country's values
one of francis haugen's lawyers is john
tai
he's the founder of a washington legal
group called whistleblower aid
what is the legal theory behind going to
the sec what laws are you alleging have
been broken
as a publicly traded company facebook is
required
to not lie to its investors
or even withhold material information
so the sec regularly brings enforcement
actions alleging that companies like
facebook and others are making material
misstatements and omissions
that affect investors
adversely one of the things that
facebook might allege is that she stole
company documents the dodd-frank act
passed over 10 years ago at this point
created uh an office of the
whistleblower inside the sec
and one of the provisions of that law
says that no company
can prohibit its employees from from
communicating with the sec and sharing
internal corporate documents with the
sec i have a lot of empathy for mark and
mark has never set out to make a hateful
platform
but he has allowed choices to be made
where the side effects of those choices
are that hateful polarizing content gets
more distribution more reach
facebook declined an interview but in a
written statement to 60 minutes it said
every day our teams have to balance
protecting the right of billions of
people to express themselves openly with
the need to keep our platform a safe and
positive place
we continue to make significant
improvements to tackle the spread of
misinformation and harmful content
to suggest we encourage bad content and
do nothing
is just not true
if any research had identified an exact
solution to these complex challenges the
tech industry governments and society
would have solved them a long time ago
facebook is a one trillion dollar
company just 17 years old it has 2.8
billion users
which is 60 percent of all internet
connected people on earth
francis haugen plans to testify before
congress this week
she believes the federal government
should impose regulations
facebook has demonstrated they cannot
act independently facebook over and over
again has shown it uses profit over
safety it is subsidizing is paying for
its profits with our safety i'm hoping
that this will have had a big enough
impact on the world
that they get the fortitude and the
motivation to actually go put those
regulations into place
that's my hope
more from the facebook whistleblower
publishers know you are more likely to
engage with angry content at
60minutesovertime.com by colaguard