The Facebook whistleblower who brought out documents that said the company knew about the negative impact of its platforms, will appear before a Senate subcommittee on Tuesday.
Frances Haugen, who revealed her identity during a Sunday interview on CBS “60 Minutes,” has worked with a Senate commerce subcommittee as part of an ongoing effort to evaluate potential regulations for the social media giant.
Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen talks with CBS’ Scott Pelley on “60 Minutes,”
Documents received by the former Facebook product manager led to a series in the Wall Street Journal reporting that Facebook commissioned studies on the potential harm of negative or inflammatory content after knowing about it and did nothing to stop it.
Findings cited in the report revealed that Instagram made body image issues worse for one in three teens.
Haugen is expected to share the evidence that she purportedly has with the Senate Subcommittee, which she believes shows that the company deliberately ignored evidence of its potentially harmful effects.
“There were conflicts of interest between what was good for the public and what was good for Facebook,” Haugen alleged on “60 Minutes” on Sunday. “And Facebook over and over again chose to optimize for its own interests like making more money.”
Facebook has publicly rebutted Haugen’s claims, pointing to the security investments the company has made in recent years.
“Every day our teams have to balance protecting the ability of people to express themselves openly with the need to keep our platform a safe and positive place,” Lena Pietsch, the director of policy communications for Facebook, said in a statement Sunday. “To suggest we encourage bad content or do nothing is just not true.”
Nick Clegg speaking on CNN
Facebook’s vice president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, said in an interview with CNN on Sunday that those who make allegations that the company is commissioning the investigation to be “deliberately” pushed aside have it the other way around.
“If we didn’t want to address those questions, we wouldn’t commission the research in the first place,” Clegg said.
Haugen has worked at Google, Pinterest, and other social media companies, but she claimed that what she saw on Facebook was much worse.
It is unclear how much information Haugen shared with the committee before testifying, but during her interview on Sunday, Haugen said she took thousands of pages of Facebook documents so that no one can doubt that this is real.
Haugen also claimed on CBS that Facebook had decided to loosen security to stop the spread of disinformation during the 2020 election season, which they believed contributed to the January 6 attack on the United States Capitol.
In an internal memo obtained by the New York Times, Clegg refuted this allegation as well, saying:
“Social media has had a big impact on society in recent years, and Facebook is often a place where much of this debate plays out,” Clegg wrote. “But what evidence there is simply does not support the idea that Facebook, or social media more generally, is the primary cause of polarization.”
Haugen’s appearance before the committee Tuesday is a part of an ongoing investigation by the US Congress to find ways to regulate big social media companies like Facebook.
