Facebook stock fell with as much as 4% on Monday after whistleblower, Frances Haugen alleged that the company does little to stop the spread of hateful content on its platform.
Frances Haugen, who is a former product manager at Facebook, leaked several internal documents that apparently proved that the choices made by the company’s management team consistently give polarizing, hateful content more reach and distribution than it should.
“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,” Haugen said.
The documents that Frances Haugen provided included an internal Facebook study that showed that only about 5% of hateful content on Facebook was addresses and that the safeguards that were in place during the 2020 American election were quickly dropped after Biden won, which apparently helped to contribute to the Capitol riots on 6 January.
The documents also showed that celebrities, politicians and high profile Facebook users were treated differently and that moderation policies were either not applied at all or that they were applied differently.
Another leak also said that Facebook was facing a lawsuit from a group of its own shareholders and that Facebook covered up evidence that Instagram (owned by Facebook) damages the psyche of its teenage users.
Haugen will testify before a Senate subcommittee on Tuesday in a hearing titled “Protecting Kids Online”, about the company’s research into Instagram and its effect on the mental health of young users.
Facebook has denied and disputed all allegations, saying in response to the whistleblower, “to suggest we encourage bad content and do nothing is just not true.”
“Every day our teams have to balance protecting the ability of billions of people to express themselves openly with the need to keep our platform a safe and positive place. We continue to make significant improvements to tackle the spread of misinformation and harmful content,” Facebook added.
It was after Ms. Frances Haugen came forward that Facebook and its apps experienced an outage that lasted for several hours.
Sources: Business Insider, BBC
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