Haugen: Facebook makes online hate worse
Facebook whistleblower LONDON — Frances Haugen told British lawmakers Monday that the social media giant stokes online hate and extremism, fails to protect children from harmful content and lacks any incentive to fix the problems, providing momentum for efforts by European governments working on stricter regulation of tech companies.
While her testimony echoed much of what she told the U.S. Senate this month, her in-person appearance drew intense interest from a British parliamentary committee that is much further along in drawing up legislation to rein in the power of social media companies. Haugen told the lawmakers that Facebook Groups amplifies online hate, saying algorithms that prioritize engagement take people with mainstream interests and push them to the extremes. The former Facebook data scientist said the company could add moderators to prevent groups over a certain size from being used to spread extremist views.
“Unquestionably, it’s making hate worse,” she said.
Haugen said she was “shocked to hear recently that Facebook wants to double down on the metaverse and that they’re gonna hire 10,000 engineers in Europe to work on the metaverse,” Haugen said, referring to Facebook’s plans for an immersive online world it believes will be the next big internet trend.
“I was like, ‘Wow, do you know what we could have done with safety if we had 10,000 more engineers?’” she said.
Facebook says it wants regulation for tech companies and was glad the U.K. was leading the way.
“While we have rules against harmful content and publish regular transparency reports, we agree we need regulation for the whole industry so that businesses like ours aren’t making these decisions on our own,” Facebook said.
It pointed to investing $13 billion (9.4 billion pounds) on safety and security since 2016 and asserted that it’s “almost halved” the amount of hate speech over the last three quarters.
U.K. lawmakers are drafting an online safety bill that would hold companies to account when it comes to removing harmful or illegal content from their platforms.