Whistleblower: Facebook chose profit over public safety
NEW YORK (AP) — A data scientist who was revealed Sunday as the Facebook whistleblower says that whenever there was a conflict between the public good and what benefited the company, the social media giant would choose its own interests.
Frances Haugen was identified in a “60 Minutes” interview Sunday as the woman who anonymously filed complaints with federal law enforcement that the company’s own research shows how it magnifies hate and misinformation.
Haugen, who worked at Google and Pinterest before joining Facebook in 2019, said she had asked to work in an area of the company that fights misinformation, since she lost a friend to online conspiracy theories.
“Facebook, over and over again, has shown it chooses profit over safety,” she said. Haugen, who will testify before Congress this week, said she hopes that by coming forward the government will put regulations in place to govern the company’s activities.
https://apnews.com/article/facebook-whistleblower-frances-haugen-4a3640440769d9a241c47670facac213
Facebook hastily switched off safeguards after Biden beat Trump, helping pave path to deadly Capitol riot: whistleblower
Facebook prematurely turned off safeguards designed to thwart misinformation and rabble rousing after Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in last year’s presidential election in a moneymaking move that a company whistleblower alleges contributed to the deadly Jan. 6 invasion of the U.S. Capitol.
The whistleblower, former Facebook product manager Frances Haugen, also asserted during an exclusive interview that aired Sunday on CBS’s “60 Minutes” that a 2018 change to the content flow in Facebook’s FB, -4.88% news feeds contributed to more divisiveness and ill will in a network ostensibly created to bring people closer together.
Despite the enmity that the new algorithms were feeding, Facebook found that they helped keep people coming back — a pattern that helped the Menlo Park, Calif., company sell more of the digital ads that generate most of its advertising.
“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,” said Haugen, who joined Facebook in 2019 after working at other Silicon Valley companies such as Google and Pinterest . “And Facebook, over and over again, chose to optimize for its own interests, like making more money.”
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/former-product-manager-says-facebook-hastily-turned-off-safeguards-after-biden-beat-trump-helping-pave-path-to-deadly-capitol-riot-01633312867