In her opening written testimony on Tuesday Facebook (FB) whistleblower Frances Haugen told the Senate Commerce Committee that "Facebook’s products harm children, stoke division, and weaken our democracy."
Haugen, a former Facebook employee said that the company regularly
on Capitol Hill Tuesday about internal documents she leaked to the Wall Street Journal exposing the social network’s knowledge that, as the Journal put it, “its platforms are riddled with flaws that cause harm.”
Haugen, a former Facebook product engineer, will testify at 10 a.m. on Tuesday to senators, less than a week after Facebook’s global head of safety Antigone Davis was grilled by the same subcommittee over accusations that it has taken a page from Big Tobacco in hiding research that its products are harmful.
The interview comes a day after Facebook asked a federal judge on Monday to throw out the Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust suit against the company, saying the FTC has “no basis for branding Facebook an unlawful monopolist." It also follows Monday’s global outage of Facebook’s family of products including Facebook, Instagram, Facebook Messenger, and its Oculus VR apps.
Tuesday’s hearing is expected to focus on Haugen’s leaks and what regulators should do to take Facebook to task. Haugen’s appearance follows her “60 Minutes” interview on Sunday when she revealed that Facebook can only take action against 3% to 5% of hate on the platform and less than 1% of violence and incitement despite being the best platform in the world at doing so.
During that interview, Haugen also said that Facebook is fully aware that divisive content will get people to engage with the service and remain on it longer. That engagement, in turn, drives more advertising dollars, Facebook’s main revenue source.
“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 said during the segment.
'What's super tragic' about Facebook's research
Haugen’s leaked documents first came to light as part of a series of articles in The Wall Street Journal, showing that Facebook is aware of issues ranging from human trafficking to drug cartels recruiting on its platform and can’t deal with the problems on its own.
For the senators, however, the primary takeaway has been the impact Facebook’s Instagram has on teen girls and their body image. According to documents Haugen provided to The Wall Street Journal, 32% of girls reported that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse.
“What's super tragic is Facebook's own research says, as these young women begin to consume this — this eating disorder content, they get more and more depressed,” Haugen said.
Facebook has pushed back on the report by saying it wasn’t fully representative of the data. But the report has proven to be especially problematic for the company and its plans to launch a version of Instagram for kids under 13.
The prospect of such a service already received significant heat from lawmakers and regulators including more than 40 attorneys general. However, The Wall Street Journal’s reporting opened the floodgates, with Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) pushing for a probe into Facebook.
The company has since announced that it will pause the service, though it hasn’t canned it entirely, saying that it still believes such a product is worthwhile. Facebook says that it’s aware that users under 13 are already on Instagram, and that a service designed for them specifically would help protect them from dangerous content and give parents the ability to monitor their usage.
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