Facebook Whistleblower Frances Haugen: The 60 Minutes Interview

her name is francis haugen that is a fact that  facebook has been anxious to know since last month. when an anonymous former employee filed complaints  with federal law enforcement the complaints say. facebook's own research shows that it amplifies  hate misinformation and political unrest but the. company hides what it knows one complaint alleges  that facebook's instagram harms teenage girls.

what makes haugen's complaints unprecedented is  the trove of private facebook research she took. when she quit in may the documents appeared first  last month in the wall street journal but tonight. frances haugen is revealing her identity to  explain why she became the facebook whistleblower. the story will continue in a moment. the thing i saw at facebook over and over again  was there were conflicts of interest between what.

was good for the public and what was good for  facebook and facebook over and over again chose. to optimize for its own interests like making more  money francis haugen is 37 a data scientist from. iowa with a degree in computer engineering and a  harvard master's degree in business for 15 years. she's worked for companies including google and  pinterest i've seen a bunch of social networks.

and it was substantially worse at facebook than  anything i'd seen before you know someone else. might have just quit and moved on and i wonder why  you take this stand imagine you know what's going. on inside facebook and you know no one on the  outside knows i knew what my future looked like. if i continued to stay inside of facebook which is  person after person after person has tackled this. inside of facebook and ground themselves to the  ground when and how did it occur to you to take. all of these documents out of the company at some  point in 2021 i realized okay i'm going to have.

to do this in a systemic way and i have to get out  enough that no one can question that this is real. she secretly copied tens of thousands  of pages of facebook internal research. she says evidence shows that the company is lying  to the public about making significant progress. against hate violence and misinformation one study  she found from this year says we estimate that we.

may action as little as three to five percent  of hate and about six tenths of one percent of. violence and incitement on facebook despite  being the best in the world at it to quote. from another one of the documents you brought  out we have evidence from a variety of sources. that hate speech divisive political speech and  misinformation on facebook and the family of apps. are affecting societies around the world when  we live in an information environment that is.

full of angry hateful polarizing content it erodes  our civic trust it erodes our faith in each other. it erodes our ability to want to care for each  other the version of facebook that exists today. is tearing our societies apart and  causing ethnic violence around the world. ethnic violence including myanmar in 2018 when  the military used facebook to launch a genocide.

the first quarter of 2019. francis haugen told  us she was recruited by facebook in 2019 she. says she agreed to take the job only if she could  work against misinformation because she had lost. a friend to online conspiracy theories i never  wanted anyone to feel the pain that i had felt. and i had seen how high the stakes were in terms  of making sure there was high quality information. on facebook at headquarters she was assigned  to civic integrity which worked on risks to.

elections including misinformation but after  this past election there was a turning point. they told us we're dissolving civic integrity  like they basically said oh good we made it. through the election there wasn't riots we can get  rid of civic integrity now fast forward a couple. months we got the insurrection and when they got  rid of civic integrity it was the moment where. i was like i don't trust that they're willing to  actually invest what needs to be invested to keep.

facebook from being dangerous facebook says  the work of civic integrity was distributed to. other units haugen told us the root of facebook's  problem is in a change that it made in 2018 to its. algorithms the programming that decides  what you see on your facebook news feed. so you know you have your phone you might see  only 100 pieces of content if you sit and scroll.

off for you know five minutes but facebook  has thousands of options it could show you. the algorithm picks from those options based on  the kind of content you've engaged with the most. in the past and one of the consequences of how  facebook is picking out that content today is it. is optimizing for content that gets engagement  or reaction but its own research is showing. that content that is hateful that is divisive that  is polarizing it's easier to inspire people to.

anger than it is to other emotions misinformation  angry content is enticing to people and keeps. them on the platform yes facebook has realized  that if they change the algorithm to be safer. people will spend less time on the site they'll  click on less ads they'll make less money haugen. says facebook understood the danger to the 2020  election so it turned on safety systems to reduce.

but many of those changes she says were  temporary and as soon as the election was. over they turned them back off or they changed  the settings back to what they were before. to prioritize growth over safety and that  really feels like a betrayal of democracy to me. facebook says some of the safety systems remained  but after the election facebook was used by some. to organize the january sixth insurrection  prosecutors cite facebook posts as evidence.

photos of armed partisans and texts including  by bullet or ballot restoration of the republic. is coming extremists used many platforms but  facebook is a recurring theme after the attack. facebook employees raged on an internal message  board copied by haugen haven't we had enough. time to figure out how to manage discourse without  enabling violence we looked for positive comments.

and found this i don't think our leadership  team ignores data ignores dissent ignores truth. but that drew this reply welcome to facebook  i see you just joined in november 2020. we have been watching wishy-washy actions  of company leadership for years now. colleagues cannot conscience working for a  company that does not do more to mitigate.

the negative effects of its platform facebook  essentially amplifies the worst of human nature. it's one of these unfortunate consequences  right no one at facebook is malevolent but. the incentives are misaligned right like facebook  makes more money when you consume more content. people enjoy engaging with things that elicit an  emotional reaction and the more anger that they. get exposed to the more they interact and more  they consume that dynamic led to a complaint to.

facebook by major political parties across europe  this 2019 internal report obtained by haugen. says that the parties feel strongly that the  change to the algorithm has forced them to skew. negative in their communications on facebook  leading them into more extreme policy positions. the european political parties were essentially  saying to facebook the way you've written.

your algorithm is changing the way we lead our  countries yes you are forcing us to take positions. that we don't like that we know are bad for  society we know if we don't take those positions. we won't win in the marketplace of social media  evidence of harm she says extends to facebook's. instagram app one of the facebook internal studies  that you found talks about how instagram harms. teenage girls oh yeah one study says 13 and a  half percent of teen girls say instagram makes.

thoughts of suicide worse 17 of teen girls say  instagram makes eating disorders worse and what's. super tragic is facebook's own research says as  these young women begin to consume this eating. disorder content they get more and more depressed  and it actually makes them use the app more.

and so they end up in this feedback cycle  where they hate their bodies more and more. facebook's own research says it is not  just that instagram is dangerous for. teenagers that it harms teenagers it's that it is  distinctly worse than other forms of social media. facebook said just last week it would postpone  plans to create an instagram for younger children. last month haugen's lawyers filed at least  eight complaints with the securities and.

exchange commission which enforces the law in  financial markets the complaints compare the. internal research with the company's public face  often that of ceo mark zuckerberg here testifying. remotely to congress last march we removed content  that could lead to imminent real world harm. we've built an unprecedented third-party  fact-checking program the system isn't perfect but. it's the best approach that we've found to address  misinformation in line with our country's values.

one of francis haugen's lawyers is john tai he's  the founder of a washington legal group called. whistleblower aid what is the legal theory behind  going to the sec what laws are you alleging have. been broken as a publicly traded company facebook  is required to not lie to its investors or even. withhold material information so the  sec regularly brings enforcement actions.

alleging that companies like facebook and others  are making material misstatements and omissions. that affect investors adversely one of the things  that facebook might allege is that she stole. company documents the dodd-frank act passed  over 10 years ago at this point created uh. an office of the whistleblower inside the sec and  one of the provisions of that law says that no. company can prohibit its employees from  from communicating with the sec and sharing.

internal corporate documents with the  sec i have a lot of empathy for mark. and mark has never set out to make a hateful  platform but he has allowed choices to be made. where the side effects of those choices are that  hateful polarizing content gets more distribution. more reach facebook declined an interview but  in a written statement to 60 minutes it said. every day our teams have to balance protecting  the right of billions of people to express.

themselves openly with the need to keep our  platform a safe and positive place we continue. to make significant improvements to tackle the  spread of misinformation and harmful content. to suggest we encourage bad content and do nothing  is just not true if any research had identified an. exact solution to these complex challenges  the tech industry governments and society.

would have solved them a long time ago facebook  is a one trillion dollar company just 17 years. old it has 2.8 billion users which is 60 percent  of all internet connected people on earth francis. haugen plans to testify before congress this week  she believes the federal government should impose. regulations facebook has demonstrated they cannot  act independently facebook over and over again has.

shown it uses profit over safety it is subsidizing  is paying for its profits with our safety. i'm hoping that this will have had a big  enough impact on the world that they get. the fortitude and the motivation to actually go  put those regulations into place that's my hope. more from the facebook whistleblower publishers. know you are more likely to engage with angry  content at 60minutesovertime.com by colaguard.