These reports were based on internal documents reviewed by the Wall Street Journal. Frances Hogan, the whistleblower behind the documents’ disclosure, appeared on the 60-minute TV show to talk about why she decided to reveal some of Facebook’s secrets.
Hogan, 37, is a data scientist from Iowa with a bachelor’s degree in computer science and a master’s degree in business.
She was a product manager at Facebook assigned to the Civic Integrity group, which worked on election risks including disinformation.
Before working for the social networking giant, she worked for some notable companies like Google, Yelp and Pinterest.
She left her job in May after the Civic Integrity Group was dissolved, however before leaving she copied thousands of documents, which she later leaked to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the WSJ, and, according to the New York Times, she also worked with Whistleblower Aid, a legal nonprofit that helps Persons who aim to detect possible wrongdoing.
During the interview, Haugen said that when she joined the company it was “much worse at Facebook than anything I’ve seen before”. One of the documents it leaked states that Facebook takes action on only 3-5% of hate content and 0.6% of violence and incitement content, despite claiming to be the best at it.
She also emphasized that Facebook creates divisions in society, and that content that lives on the platform can cause violence:
When we live in an information environment filled with angry, hateful, polarizing content, it undermines our civic trust, our faith in one another, our ability to want to care for one another, the version of Facebook that exists today is tearing our communities apart and causing racial violence around the world.
In 2018, Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook made a change to an algorithm to increase potential interactions between friends and family, which Haugen said was the root cause of the problems the social network was facing.
He said Facebook doesn’t use safer algorithms so you spend more time on the site. Haugen said the company turned on some security features for the 2020 US presidential election, but turned them off once the election was over.
Before Haugen’s interview aired, Facebook’s vice president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, appeared on CNN’s trusted sources and said it was absurd to think social media was responsible for the Capitol riots in January.
Haugen ended the interview by saying, “Facebook has shown time and time again that it chooses profit over safety.”
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