Frances Haugen, welcome to The Daily Show.
Thank you for inviting me. Happy to be here.
Um, your name
isn't as big as the story
that you really, I mean, leaked to the world.
You know? A lot of people, you say, "Frances Haugen,"
they'll be like, "Who is that?"
But then if you say to people,
"Hey, remember how we all learned
"that Facebook and what social media is doing
"is essentially destroying teenagers' brains
and it's harming all of us?"
Yeah, that report happened because of you.
So, let's start with the question of "why?"
-Mm-hmm. -You've worked for, um, Google.
-You've worked for Pinterest. You've worked for Yelp. -Mm-hmm.
And yet you blew the whistle on Facebook.
-Mm-hmm. -Why did you feel like, "Oh, this...
This is something I can't sit on"?
So, when I joined, uh, Facebook, I thought I was gonna work
on misinformation in the United States.
And I was surprised, and I-I actually was charged
with working on information outsi...
-only outside the United States. -Okay.
And, um, like many people and many technologists,
I had never really focused
on Facebook's impact internationally.
And very rapidly, um,
I realized kind of the horrifying magnitude
of the danger that we were facing.
That Facebook's algorithms give the most reach
-to the most extreme and divisive ideas. -Mm-hmm.
Um, and that-that process is destabilizing
some of the most fragile places in the world,
like Ethiopia or what happened in Myanmar.
It... You see, when-when you say that,
there are some people who will accept it immediately,
and then there are some people who will be like,
"That's-that's not true at all."
But I'm sure there are a lot of people
who will say, "But, I mean,
"aren't they always going to be extreme people in the world?
You know, there's always somebody saying something."
You know, Facebook themselves say...
They go like, "Hey, we're not... We're not part of the problem.
"We're merely a platform that people put their views on.
We are not part of the problem." And you disagree with that.
So, let's imagine you had a relative
who had particularly extreme ideas.
You know, I've... We often say, like, the crazy uncle.
-Right, right, right. -'Cause, mm, some of us have those.
Uh, that person, if they're...
If we're talking to them one-on-one
or we're talking to them at a family gathering,
that scale allows for resolution of ideas.
-Okay. -What's happening on Facebook right now
is ideas that are the most able to elicit a reaction--
and the shortest path to a click is anger--
those get the most reach,
and ideas that are more moderate
or that try to bring us into synthesis
or to-to help us find a middle path,
those aren't as likely to elicit a comment from you
-or elicit a like. -Right.
And so Facebook doesn't give it as much distribution.
So, Facebook is essentially propelling
certain ideas out there.
So, they may say, "We're the platform,"
but, really, what they're also doing
is they're advocating for certain viewpoints
because they push those out because those get people engaged
-and spinning in the cycle. -So, I think it's a thing
where it's not they sit down and go,
"How can we get more extreme ideas?"
I don't think that's what they're trying to do.
But they do know that there are lots of solutions
that are not about censorship.
It's not about picking good or bad ideas
-or good or bad people. -Mm-hmm.
It's about how do we change the dynamics of these systems
so that you could have
good speech counter-counter bad speech.
How do we give those more of an equal say at the table?
You know, it's-it's interesting that you lay it out like this.
Because I remember talking to my friends about this,
-saying, "Have we become angrier in the world? -Mm.
Have we become less able to have misunderstandings?"
'Cause I-- 'cause I'll sit with my friends and I go, like,
I don't agree on so many things with my friends.
But I don't remember a time when that meant
-that I couldn't be friends with them. -Yeah.
In the world of social media right now,
-it feels like if I disagree with you on this... -Mm.
...I disagree with you on everything.
It seems like, Facebook world, if you disagree on this,
-we're gonna make or we're gonna find more ways... -Oh, yeah.
...to-to, you know-- to find where you disagree
-or-or how to make you disagree. -Mm-hmm.
Yeah, so some people have said this idea of, like, uh,
Facebook's always looking for fault lines.
Right? So-so, a "high quality" piece of content
is one that gets lots of engagement.
And it turns out an angry comment thread
where, you know, it causes us to yell at each other,
that is viewed as a higher quality piece of content.
And so, uh, you know, during, um, COVID,
I've had friends who wrote very long, thoughtful pieces.
They went and digested lots of information.
-Ah. -That's gonna cause less knee-jerk reaction
than something that really offends you.
So, "masks don't work."
-People are clicking on that. -Yeah. Yeah. Psh-shh-shh.
"Here's the thing about masks we have to consider
-in our society." Boo. -Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah.
-Facebook's not pushing that. -Or...
So, what's interesting, you know,
-in-in everything that you've done is... -Mm.
...even though you're a whistleblower,
even though you came out with this information,
you've never said, "I'm anti-Facebook."
-You've never said, "Shut Facebook down." -Mm-hmm.
-You've never said this thing needs to go away. -Yeah.
What you're arguing for is
we change our relationship with not just Facebook
-but social media companies as a whole. -Mm.
-E-Explain what that means. -Mm-hmm.
So, often, when people talk about this idea
of we need to change our relationship with social media,
it's more about, like, should we use our phones so much?
But I-I'm encouraging us to have a conversation
about what's our relationship with companies.
-Or what's the companies' relationships with us? -Okay.
Facebook knows that they have a level of-of, um,
unaccountability that's very different
than either Google or Apple or other big platforms.
Because, in the case of Google,
we can scrape, we can download their results and analyze them
and see if there are biases.
-Okay. -In the case of Apple, we can take apart the phones
and put up YouTube videos saying
-Apple phones do or don't work the way they claim. -Huh.
But in the case of Facebook,
researchers and activists have been telling Facebook,
"Hey, we have found all these examples.
"We think there's a pattern here.
"We think there's too much human trafficking.
-We think kids are suffering." -Right.
And Facebook keeps coming back because they know
no one can call them on it
and saying, "That's just anecdotal. That's not real."
But when you released the information,
we realized it wasn't anecdotal, it was real, because Facebook
-had done the research. -And Facebook knew about it.
-Right. You see, now, this is interesting. -Yeah. Yeah.
-'Cause this reminds me of the tobacco companies. -Yes.
-Yeah. Yeah. -It reminds us of the, you know...
-the fossil fuel companies. -Yeah.
They do the research,
they find out something really bad,
and then, I mean, obviously, they go, like,
"We're not gonna put this out there, but-but we know."
One of the biggest things that's really gotten people worried
-is how social media affects younger brains. -Mm-hmm.
I mean, it affects my brain. I'm--
I don't consider myself younger anymore, but
young people are-are like...
-it seems like the highest... at the highest risk. -Mm-hmm.
Yeah, Facebook's internal research says
that the highest rates of problematic use peak at age 14.
So you're not allowed to be on the platform until you're 13.
-Uh-huh. -So I guess it takes a little bit of time
to form that habit. But the largest fraction
of any of those age cohorts they sampled...
And they've done studies that have 100,000 people in them.
-Okay. -These are not tiny studies.
Um, they find that the largest fractions say,
"I can't control my usage, and I know it's impacting my health,
-"my employment or my school" is at age 14. -Wow.
And so, there's a real thing where young people have both...
-You know, they're struggling with issues in their life. -Yes.
And they don't have the self-control yet.
And they say this. They say this to researchers.
They say, "I know this is making me feel bad,
"and I can't stop.
-I fear I'll be ostracized if I leave." -Mm-hmm.
And those factors mean it's not easy for kids just to walk away.
It's also not easy for people to understand how to, um...
how to fix it. You have lawmakers now...
-Mm. -...who are trying to figure this thing out.
-Silicon Valley is way ahead of them. -Yup.
Like, way ahead of them. Lawmakers.
You see these hearings. They'd be like,
"What if... what if my Facebook is an insta flap?"
They don't understand what's happening.
So how do we begin creating a world
-where we're not destroying the companies... -Mm.
...but we're-we're regulating them the way they should be?
So the main thing I'm advocating for is around transparency.
Because one of the problems today is because
-Facebook is the only one that holds the cards... -Mm-hmm.
...like, they can see... they can see whether or not
they're holding, you know, a royal flush or not.
-Right. -What they claim.
Um, we need to move to a world
where we have more access to data.
And that can be aggregate data.
It can be privacy-sensitive data.
It doesn't have to, you know, expose people. It's not...
-It's a false choice of privacy versus transparency. -Right.
And once we have the ability to have conversations,
we can stop talking about boogie man social media...
-I see. -...and we start having conversations
on how do we solve these problems.
I think what we need to do,
and this is what I'm gonna spend 2022 doing,
is we need to start organizing people.
Like, I want to plant a youth-directed movement
where we can begin putting pressure on Facebook
-to release this information. -Mm-hmm.
Because I don't think Facebook is just gonna do it
automatically out of the goodness of its heart.
-Right. Right. -We have to force them to.
And I think there's lots and lots of opportunities
where we can begin putting pressure on them,
either socially or financially.
-Yeah. -As a user of social media,
as a person who speaks to all my friends on social media,
and I have my enemies on social media,
I appreciate this conversation 'cause I think, um,
-Yeah. -...if we're not careful, we end up in a world
where we're all fighting really just because
an algorithm is trying to make us fight half of those fights.
-Mm-hmm. -I've noticed even with the show,
-if I say a thing on the show... -Mm-hmm. Mm.
This'd be, like, the most interesting thing for me, is,
depending on what I say,
-Facebook sends that to different people. -Ooh.
-One time we had on the show where... -That's a real thing.
One... Yeah. One time we had on the show
where, um, literally I'd laid out both arguments.
-I said, "Here's one way to see it." -Yeah.
"Here's another way to see it."
-But then, on Facebook, only one way went to each group. -Yeah.
-Yeah. Mm-hmm. -And I was fascinated by that.
'Cause then people are like, "Why didn't you say it
the other way?" I was like, "But that's exactly what I said."
They're like, "Oh, well, I didn't see that."
-And then you realize... You know? -Yeah.
So, one of the things that happens is, um,
so let's say you take a video clip.
So let's say you have, out of any given one of your shows,
people go and put on YouTube lots of different little chunks.
People can re-seed those onto Facebook over and over again,
-and they do. -Right, right.
And each time that enters into Facebook--
you know, someone posts it to a group, someone does this--
it enters into the network in a different way.
And the algorithm begins picking up data on that,
and it says: Oh, interesting,
like, these kinds of people engage, these ones don't.
And so, and because it's entering
from so many different points, it actually gets a chance
to learn what kinds of people or communities
it engages the most with.
And so that echo chamber is real.
-Like, the algorithm pulls us towards homogeneity. -Yes.
It's almost like Facebook knows
that you react most to your neighbor
when they play loud music.
-(laughs) -There's no reaction from you
when your neighbor's doing other things,
but when your neighbor plays loud music,
that's when you react-- so then Facebook goes,
-"I'm just gonna..." -It's even worse than that, actually.
-How can it be worse? -Imagine there's music that you like,
-and there's music you don't like. -Oh, wow.
It actually knows you really don't like,
-I don't know, reggaeton or something. -Oh, wow.
-And one of the things that's, like, really sad is, um, -Okay.
one of the things that was in the documents
is that people talk about, um,
especially people from marginalized communities,
that they will go and correct people who are spreading, um,
you know, racist, sexist, homophobic comments,
and guess what, now Facebook knows you engage
-with these keywords... -So they send you more of that.
-And so they send more of it. -Yeah. Yeah.
I didn't know they were doing that...
They don’t do it on purpose. It's a side effect.
-It's a side effect of the way the algorithm works. -Yep. Yep.
So the algorithm is designed to get
as much engagement as possible,
and then engagement, unfortunately,
means you're more likely-- there's a car accident,
-I'm going to engage. -Yeah. Yeah.
Or more of, um, if they had an option of showing you a stream
of different things, they know you gawk at car accidents,
so they show you more.
Man. This is hard, because on the one hand, I go like,
well, I need to stop looking at car accidents,
-but the brain is the brain. -It's the brain.
You know, if all the-- AI is not intelligent.
-Right? We like to say Artificial Intelligence. -Yes.
But the people who actually study it
call it "machine learning," because it's not intelligent.
It's just a hill climber. Optimizing.
And, you know, think of all the different pieces of content
-you've been exposed to. -Mm-hmm.
Uh, it's not trying to show you the most extreme content.
It happens to be, to fulfill its goal function,
-it mindlessly pushes you towards them. -I understand.
And so this is about Facebook making choices to not fix it.
Facebook has lots and lots of options that...
They're letting the machine run wild.
-Money. -Money.
That's what it is.
Thank you so much for being here.
This has really been enlightening.
-Good luck on the rest of your journey. -Thank you so much.
If you want to learn more about Frances's advocacy work,
then you can go to franceshaugen.com.