By Sammie Jones-
Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen has told Mps the social media giant is ”dangerous” and promotes ”online hate” to UK politicians amid fresh revelations about the company’s inner workings.
Ms Haugen has come before the committee to influence the UK’s proposed Online Safety Bill, which will put new rules in place for big social networks.
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It follows thousands of leaked documents exposing failings of the social media giant.Frances Haugen said Facebook groups are “dangerous” and use algorithms that “take people who have mainstream interests and push them to extreme interests.
She said the groups can become “echo chambers” reinforcing and radicalising people’s opinions.
She also told the committee that Facebook sees safety as a “cost centre” and that it “unquestionably” makes online hate worse.
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She said “engagement-based metrics” – such as how many people like, share or comment on a post – were a problem on all sites.
Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg has rejected her claims, saying her attacks on the company were “misrepresenting” the work it does and that it “cares deeply about issues like safety, well-being and mental health”.
Haugen left Facebook earlier this year, but leaked thousands of documents expressing discontent with the social media giants handling of complaints respondoing to abuse on its platform.
Facebook, meanwhile, has characterised previous reporting as misleading. documents to the Wall Street Journal.
The publication ran a series of articles which Facebook considered to be negative – and, it contends, mischaracterised the source material.
She revealed that Facebook knew that Instagram was damaging to teenagers’ mental health, for example – led to her being invited to testify to politicians and regulators around the world.
Included in the disclosures from Haugen is that facebook spends a lot of time and resources studying how to solve such problems, but has declined in some cases to implement potential solutions put forward by its own researchers
The chair of the committee, MP Damian Collins, said it “will establish a new era of regulation for tech platforms which will make them accountable”.
Allegations include that the social media giant is aware of its role in inciting violence all around the world,s or causing harm to its users from US and UK to India and Ethiopia.
The complaints points to a rift between employees raising the alarm about their concerns and a corporate machine that does not appear to be using this to inform its policies.
The allegations include an NBC News report on a Facebook experiment that saw a new account inundated with the QAnon conspiracy theory within two days of following recommendations.
It includes a piece by CNN about Facebook’s own analysis of 6 January, which reportedly found the organisation was unprepared for what happened.
Haugen alleges in letters to the SEC Office of the Whistleblower that Facebook executives up to and including CEO Mark Zuckerberg have misled investors for years, giving them a false picture of the reality inside the company about subjects like Facebook’s user base and its record on human rightsorted by the New York Times.Axios also reports that Facebook has internally warned its staff to expect “more bad headlines in the coming days”.
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