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Amplifying Hate, Misinformation, and Political Unrest Is Facebook’s Business Model

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Sunday night’s 60 Minute exclusive featuring former Facebook employee Frances Haugen confirmed what many of us have already known: that its business model relies on amplifying hate, misinformation, and political unrest… and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Haugen says in her time with Facebook she saw, “conflicts of interest between what was good for the public and what was good for Facebook.”

According to CBS News: Facebook has been anxious to know Haugen’s name 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 on 60 Minutes, Frances Haugen is revealing her identity to explain why she became the Facebook whistleblower.

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 3-5% of hate and about 6-tenths of 1% of V & I [violence and incitement] on Facebook despite being the best in the world at it.”

From the broadcast:

Frances Haugen: 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.

Frances 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.

Scott Pelley: You know, someone else might have just quit and moved on. And I wonder why you take this stand.

Frances Haugen: Imagine you know what’s going on inside of 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.

Scott Pelley: When and how did it occur to you to take all of these documents out of the company?

Frances Haugen: At some point in 2021, I realized, “Okay, I’m gonna have to do this in a systemic way, and I have to get out enough that no one can question that this is real.”

Read the full story here.

Watch the clip below.

 

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