At Yale, whistleblower warns of global dangers
Facebook is blamed for helping spread hate
NEW HAVEN — Frances Haugen, the Facebook whistleblower, brought her message to the Yale Law School Thursday evening, saying the harm is even greater outside the United States.
Haugen, 37, a former project manager for Facebook who testified before U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal’s subcommittee on consumer protection Tuesday, leaked thousands of pages about Facebook’s internal policies to the Wall Street Journal.
In a virtual webinar sponsored by the law school’s Information Society Project, Haugen joined three other speakers to discuss what needs to be done to protect children and keep autocratic regimes from using the platform to violently stifle dissent and undermine their opponents.
“The version we see in the United States is the most sanitized version of Facebook,” Haugen said. “I didn’t have an appreciation for the scale of how many people die from violence that’s fanned by the choices that Facebook makes on the platform or Facebook’s choices to underinvest in security of people who don’t speak English.”
Haugen said she “knew that misinformation was dangerous before I came to Facebook,” but when a friend who had helped her through a serious illness became radicalized by the internet in 2016, she knew she had to bring to light how the company, which also owns Instagram and WhatsApp, was allowing misinformation to be shared worldwide.
“As I learned about the company and how it was operating, I began to have less and less faith that it could be corrected internally,” Haugen said. But “the moment that kind of pushed me over the edge” was when the civic integrity team was disbanded after the 2020 election and all of the product managers she had worked with left within six weeks.
“I saw that what we see in Myanmar and what we see in Ethiopia are only the opening chapters of a novel that has an ending that is far scarier than any of us want to read,” she said.
Facebook has been cited for inciting ethnic violence against the Rohingya minority in Myanmar (formerly known as Burma), where 53 percent of the population use the service, according to the Guardian. Similar violence against the Tigray opposition in Ethiopia has been blamed on Facebook because it allowed hate speech and incited angry responses.
What American don’t realize is that only 7 percent of Facebook’s users live in the United States, but the company spends 87 percent of its budget to lessen misinformation on its English platforms, Haugen said. However, “The reason why they’re doing that is because, if people think that Facebook is unsafe in the United States, they’ll regulate it,” she said.
Another speaker on the panel was Shoshana Zuboff, professor
emerita at Harvard Business School and author of “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. “This is not a story about corporate concentrations of economic power or about dangerous products,” Zuboff said. “It’s a story about concentrations of a new kind of social power and its social harms. This power originates in the secretive, massive-scale extraction of behavioral data. Corporations can now know us in infinite detail and transform that knowledge into the power to trigger, to tune, to target and shape what we know, feel, think and more.”
But Zuboff said she was optimistic about democracy’s power to deal with oligarchs and other overly powerful companies. Proposals in the European Union, for example, “for the first time offer
the promise of beginning … to shift the trajectory, to shift our direction toward a democratic digital future ... to begin to make this shift so that we establish the principle that the digital lives in democracy’s house.”
Some of the changes needed are easily within Facebook’s power to change, the speakers said. One is to reduce the ability of misinformation to go viral. Haugen suggested that if a post is shared and reshared, it wouldn’t be shareable again.
“We’d have to copy and paste it before we go on . ... Copy and pasting is not oppression,” Haugen said. “Changes like that, really simple ones that reduce virality and build in friction. It gives people a chance to think, do I care about this thing enough to keep pushing it along. Those kinds of changes, radically decrease the amount of misinformation on the platform.”
That would make a difference because in some countries, 35 percent of the feed is a reshare, and those tend to be the most extreme posts, Haugen said.
Haugen and others also warned about the pervasiveness of social media on children and teens and how their lives are much different than those in the past. “You could go home at the end of the day and the vast majority of kids have their home lives, they got a break,” Haugen said. “You know, it didn’t matter how bad I got bullied, you had a solid 16 hours to reset before you went back into the fray. And now that bullying or that harassment follows kids into their bedrooms.”
She said it doesn’t work to tell children to just turn off their phone because they fear being ostracized and they use Instagram and other media as their communication tools.
“The last thing kids see before they fall asleep at night is someone being cruel to them or they wake up in the morning to some horrible slur about them, and that really, really wears kids down,” Haugen said. “And Facebook knows that parents don’t have the right context about neurological development ... what is or isn’t effective for coaching kids on how to deal with these situations.”
Both parents and schools need information on how to support children in handling social media, she said.