The Facebook Whistleblower

In this informative article, Josh will explore Francis Haugen's public accusations against the billion dollar company Facebook. Follow Haugen's journey from employee to advocate.

The Facebook Whistleblower

By Josh Feskens

Frances Haugen, a former Facebook product manager, revealed her identity on Sunday and spoke with “60 Minutes.Photo Credit: Robert Fortunato for CBS News/60MINUTES

A whistleblower is someone who informs the government of illegal or illicit happenings within a company or organization, and Francis Haugen has been deemed the Facebook Whistleblower. Although Haugen is not the first Facebook Whistleblower, her voice is the strongest. Haugen is a former employee of Facebook who, over a month ago, brought forward tens of thousands of documents incriminating Facebook of knowingly spreading content with misinformation, violence and incitement .

Haugen is a thirty-seven-year-old data scientist from Iowa who has a degree in computer engineering, and a Harvard's Masters Degree in business. Over the past fifteen years, she has worked for big companies like Google and Pinterest. After working for Facebook for under two years, Haugen now claims that the company is lying to the public and its investors about making progress against hate, violence, and misinformation.

In 2019, Facebook changed its algorithm to Downstream MSI (Meaningful Social Interaction), which ranks posts with more interaction and promotes the highest ranking to users' feeds. This does not sound like a problem, but the content that has the highest interaction is often the violent and angry content, and this content has proved to entice users more. This algorithm was temporarily altered for the 2020 election, and Facebook turned on a safety system to reduce misinformation.

According to Haugen, after the election was over, this safety system was turned off because the safer algorithm makes less money than the new one. Data on the new algorithm cited by Scott Pelley shows Facebook admitting, "... we estimate that we may action as little as 3-5% of hate…" and " ~0.6% of violence and incitement on Facebook…" It is troubling, to say the least, that they have had the knowledge of what was going on inside the company and chose to do little about it.

One thing Haugen has said numerous times is that Facebook will choose profit over safety again and again. This is proved by data from Facebook on an app it owns, Instagram. Their data shows that 13.5% of girls say Instagram makes thoughts of suicide worse, and 17% say Instagram makes eating disorders worse. What is even worse is that research also shows that eating disorders cause higher levels of depression and cause girls to use Instagram more often, inducing higher levels of depression and worse eating disorder conditions. Facebook can also be linked to the Myanmar genocide, where it was used to incite violence against the Muslim Rohingya people. This event caused over 25,000 deaths and made 700,000 people become refugees, and Facebook played a prominent role in it according to the New York Times.

Francis Haugen is playing a key role in shedding light to the darker sides of Facebook. Through her copying and circulating of Facebook's internal information, data, and research, she was able to go before Congress and speak out against Facebook's negligence in hope of a better future for Facebook, one with no misinformation and violent content. Many people take social media's negative effects for granted, but Haugen has shown that it can have extremely destructive consequences and is spreading awareness about certain qualities of both Instagram and Facebook. It took a lot of bravery to do what Haugen did. Hopefully, her actions will lead to a more safe social media environment for all.

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