The whistleblower who provided a trove of Facebook papers suggesting the social media giant knew its products were inciting hatred and damaging children’s mental health revealed her identity in a television interview on Sunday, accusing the corporation of prioritising “profit over safety

Frances Haugen, a 37-year-old data scientist from Iowa, has worked for firms like as Google and Pinterest, but she told CBS News’ 60 Minutes that Facebook was “substantially worse” than anything she had seen previously.

She demanded that the firm be controlled.

“Facebook over and over again has shown it chooses profit over safety. It is subsidising, it is paying for its profits with our safety,” Ms Haugen said.

“The version of Facebook that exists today is tearing our societies apart and causing ethnic violence around the world,” she said.

The world’s largest social media site has been embroiled in a maelstrom sparked by Ms Haugen, who shared documents with US lawmakers and The Wall Street Journal as an unknown whistleblower detailing how Facebook knew its products, particularly Instagram, were affecting young girls.

In the 60 Minutes interview, she revealed how the algorithm that determines what appears in a user’s News Feed is customized for information that elicits a response.

The company’s own research says that it is “easier to inspire people to anger than it is to other emotions,” Haugen said.

“Facebook has realised 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.”

She claims that during the 2020 US presidential election, the corporation recognized the risk that such information posed and activated safety systems to mitigate it.

But “as soon as the election was over they turn them back off, or they change the settings back to what they were before, to prioritise growth over safety, and that really feels like a betrayal of democracy to me,” she said.

“No one at Facebook is malevolent,” she said, adding that the incentives are “misaligned”.

“Facebook makes more money when you consume more content … And the more anger that they get exposed to, the more they interact, the more they consume.”

Ms Haugen did not draw a direct connection between the decision to pull down safety procedures and the US Capitol riot on January 6, while 60 Minutes observed that some of the organizers of that violence used the social network.

Earlier on Sunday, Facebook denounced as “ludicrous” claims that it was involved in the January 6 unrest.

Facebook’s vice president of policy and global affairs, Nick Clegg, also angrily denied that its platforms are “toxic” for minors, only days after a contentious congressional session in which US lawmakers grilled the firm on its influence on young users’ mental health.

“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,” Mr Clegg wrote to Facebook employees in a memo on Friday ahead of the interview. “But what evidence there is simply does not support the idea that Facebook, or social media more generally, is the primary cause of polarisation.”

Facebook spokesman Andy Stone also pushed back against the allegations in a written letter to the Wall Street Journal, saying, “to suggest we encourage bad content and do nothing is just not true”.

Image Credit: Getty

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