Frances Haugen testified that Facebook’s products ‘harm children, stoke division and weaken our democracy’
The Senate hearing is in a break
From CNN’s Samantha Murphy Kelly and Clare Duffy
The Senate hearing with Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen is in a break.
The former Facebook product manager who worked on civic integrity issues at the company has faced questions from a Commerce subcommittee about what Facebook-owned Instagram knew about its effects on young users, among other issues.
“I am here today because I believe that Facebook’s products harm children, stoke division, and weaken our democracy,” she said during her opening remarks. “The company’s leadership knows how to make Facebook and Instagram safer but won’t make the necessary changes because they have put their astronomical profits before people. Congressional action is needed. They won’t solve this crisis without your help.”
She emphasized that she came forward “at great personal risk” because she believes “we still have time to act. But we must act now.”
Read more about today’s hearing here.
Whistleblower: Facebook’s artificial intelligence systems only catch “very tiny minority” of offending content
From CNN’s Aditi Sangal
Facebook’s artificial intelligence (AI) systems “only catch a very tiny minority of offending content,” whistleblower Frances Haugen told congressional lawmakers on Tuesday.
“The reality is that we’ve seen from repeated documents within my disclosures, is that Facebook’s AI systems only catch a very tiny minority of offending content. And best case scenario, and the case of something like hate speech, at most they will ever get 10 to 20%. In the case of children, that means drug paraphernalia ads like that, it’s likely if they rely on computers and not humans, they will also likely never get more than 10 to 20% of those ads,” Haugen explained.
She said the reason behind it is Facebook’s “deep focus on scale.”
“So scale is, ‘can we do things very cheaply for a huge number of people?’ Which is part of why they rely on AI so much. It’s possible none of those ads were seen by a human,” she said.
Facebook, a trillion-dollar business, struggles to tackle problems because it’s ‘understaffed,’ whistleblower says
From CNN’s Brian Stelter
Facebook is extraordinarily profitable, so it is intriguing to hear Frances Haugen repeatedly refer to the company as “understaffed.” She said this staffing shortage contributes to a vicious cycle of platform-wide problems.
“Facebook has struggled for a long time to recruit and retain the number of employees it needs to tackle the large scope of projects that it has chosen to take on,” Haugen said, emphasizing the word “chosen.”
“Facebook is stuck in a cycle where it struggles to hire; that causes it to understaff projects; which causes scandals; which then makes it harder to hire,” she said.
In a later exchange, Haugen described the following “pattern of behavior:” Often, she said, “problems were so understaffed that there was kind of an implicit discouragement from having better detection systems.” For example, “my last team at Facebook was on the counterespionage team within the threat intelligence org, and at any given time, our team could only handle a third of the cases that we knew about. We knew that if we built even a basic detecter, we would likely have many more cases.”
It’s a twist on the adage about being “too big to fail.” Longtime tech reporter Craig Silverman observed that Haugen was calling Facebook “too big to staff.”
Whistleblower: Bullying on Instagram follows kids home
From CNN’s Aditi Sangal
Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen told Senate lawmakers that Instagram has changed home lives for children.
“The kids who are bullied on Instagram, the bullying follows them home. It follows them into their bedrooms. The last thing they see before they go to bed at night is someone being cruel to them. Or the first thing in the morning is someone being cruel to them. Kids are learning that their own friends, people who they care about, are cruel to them,” she said.
This could potentially impact their domestic relationships as they grow older, Haugen added.
“Facebook’s own research is aware that children express feelings of loneliness and struggling with these things because they can’t even get support from their own parents” who have never had this experience with technology, the former Facebook employee added. “I don’t know understand how Facebook can know all these things and not escalate it to someone like Congress for help and support in navigating these problems.”
Watch here:
Facebook spokesperson weighs in on Haugen’s testimony
From CNN Business’ Clare Duffy
As lawmakers questioned whistleblower Frances Haugen about how Facebook attracts and treats young users, Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone pushed back in real time on Twitter. He tweeted that Haugen did not directly work on child safety issues at the company.
Haugen has been transparent about the fact that she did not work on child safety issues at Facebook; she noted in one answer that although she has some knowledge of the issue, she did not work directly on it. However, Haugen provided extensive internal documentation related to Facebook’s research on the topic to lawmakers.
Facebook whistleblower says 2020 election misinformation caused her to speak out
From CNN’s Adrienne Vogt
Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen said the impetus for her to speak out came after the 2020 presidential election.
“There was a long series of moments where I became aware that Facebook — when faced with conflicts of interest between its own profits and the common good, public safety — that Facebook consistently chose to prioritize its profits. I think the moment which I realized we needed to get help from the outside, that the only way these problems would be solved would be by solving them together, was when civic integrity was dissolved following the 2020 election,” Haugen told lawmakers at a Senate hearing.
“It really felt like a betrayal of the promises that Facebook had made to people who had sacrificed a great deal to keep the election safe, by basically dissolving our community and integrating in just other parts of the company,” she said.
Some more background: Haugen, 37, joined Facebook in 2019 to work on civic integrity, including “issues related to democracy and misinformation,” according to her website. Those issues have been front and center for critics of Facebook and other social media companies, particularly around the coronavirus pandemic and the 2020 US Presidential Election.
Haugen took the job at Facebook to work on addressing misinformation, she said in a “60 Minutes” interview Sunday. Similarly to today’s hearing, she said her feelings about the company started to change when it decided to dissolve its civic integrity team shortly after the election.
CNN’s Rishi Iyengar contributed reporting to this post.
Whistleblower: Facebook “knows it is leading young users” to content promoting eating disorders
Sen. Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat from Minnesota, asked former Facebook employee Frances Haugen if the company is using its algorithm to push “outrageous content” promoting eating disorders to young girls.
She said that Facebook “knows it is leading young users” to content related to eating disorders.
“Facebook knows engagement-based ranking, the way they pick the content in Instagram for young users, for all users, amplifies preferences…They’ve done something called a proactive incident response where they take things that they heard, for example, can you be led by the algorithms to anorexia content and they have literally recreated this experiment and confirmed yes, this happens to people,” she said.
Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to go sailing comes under fire at Senate panel hearing
From CNN Business’ Clare Duffy
Multiple senators criticized a sailing trip Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg apparently took earlier this week amid a firestorm for his company.
On Sunday, hours before Frances Haugen’s identity was revealed on “60 Minutes” and a day before an hours-long outage to Facebook’s products, Zuckerberg posted a video of his wife, Dr. Priscilla Chan, on a boat to his Facebook and Instagram pages.
“Sailing with Priscilla and friends,” he said, adding that the video was shot on Facebook’s new Ray-Ban smart glasses.
Senators were not amused.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal said in his opening remarks, “Mark Zuckerberg ought to be looking at himself in the mirror today and yet rather than taking responsibility, and showing leadership, Mr. Zuckerberg is going sailing.”
When they found out that their algorithms were fostering polarization, misinformation and hate, that they allowed 99% of their violent content to remain unchecked on their platform, including lead-up to the January 6 insurrection, what do they do? They now, as we know, Mark Zuckerberg’s going sailing and saying no apologies,” Sen. Amy Klobuchar added.
Whistleblower: There was “an implicit discouragement from having better detection systems” at Facebook
From CNN’s Aditi Sangal
Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen told lawmakers that understaffing issues often caused “an implicit discouragement from having better detection systems” at the tech company.
“My last team at Facebook was on the counterespionage team within the threat intelligence org. And at any given time, our team could only handle a third of the cases that we knew about. We knew that if we built even a basic detector, we would likely have many more cases,” she said.
This was a “pattern of behavior” that she said she observed.
Source: http://rss.cnn.com/~r/rss/cnn_topstories/~3/Jwca-Y0eMPk/index.html
