After revealing some of Facebook’s dirty secrets to U.S. legislators, whistleblower Frances Haugen is making the rounds in the European Union this week, as officials there look at applying laws such as the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act to the tech giant’s operations.
“Haugen joined Facebook in June 2019, where she reportedly worked on the company’s 200-person “civic integrity” division,” wrote Theo Wayt at the NY Post Oct. 4. “She and four other new hires were tasked with building a system to track misinformation targeted at specific groups of people in just three months. The project failed due to inadequate resources, Haugen said. She saw that other civic integrity teams were also understaffed, including the groups responsible for tracking slavery, sex trafficking and organ selling … She reportedly observed that Facebook resisted adding any safety measures that would reduce the amount of time people spent on the company’s platforms.”
Much of the ire of consumer advocates, of which Haugen’s testimony augments, focuses on Facebook algorithms that are designed to serve up content in ways that will keep people engaged and clicking. Jillian Deutsch and Nikos Chrysoloras at Bloomberg report ad sales account for 98.5% of Facebook’s estimated $70 billion annual revenue.
“A key question will be to what extent the EU should regulate Facebook’s algorithm, which Haugen — backed by a trove of documents shared with media — claims helps disseminate misinformation, clickbait and hate speech,” Deutsch and Chrysoloras write. “EU institutions are still debating how to best tackle such content, but will have to make decisions soon if they want to have the new rules in place sometime next year.”
Turning off the algorithms, experts implicitly suggest, would cut down on that revenue and Facebook has an incentive to keep manipulating content to make money.
In positive developments around the algorithm, tech media were reporting last spring that Facebook was allowing people to select Favorite or Recent filters to change how the platform arranged their newsfeeds.
Still, critics call for more transparency and change.
“Facebook should commit to fostering healthier discourse, and begin working with independent experts to define specific goals, adjust algorithms accordingly, and develop relevant output metrics to quantify their progress as changes are implemented,” write analysts at Accountable Tech, describing the context of Facebook’s criticism.
Keep an eye on how Facebook (soon to be “Meta”?) deals with all of this scrutiny.
