Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen was “shocked” when she heard the company planned to hire 10,000 engineers in Europe to work on the metaverse, a version of the internet based on virtual and augmented reality, when its money would be better spent on safety, she told British lawmakers Monday.
“I was shocked to hear that Facebook wants to double-down on the metaverse and that they’re going to hire 10,000 engineers in Europe to work on the metaverse,” she said. “Because I was like, ‘Wow, do you know what we could have done with safety if we had 10,000 more engineers?’ It would have been amazing.”
Haugen, 37, a former product manager on Facebook’s civic misinformation team, made the statement while giving evidence to a joint committee, which was convened to discuss a draft of an online safety bill, a piece of legislation aimed at regulating social media. Her evidence will inform the committee’s work in shaping the bill, which is due to be put before parliament for approval in 2022.
The bill would hold social media companies accountable for harmful content shared on their platforms, leading to major fines in the United Kingdom if they don’t remove material such as child sexual abuse and terrorist content.
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“There is a view inside the company that safety is a cost center, it’s not a growth center, which I think is very short-term in thinking because Facebook’s own research has shown that when people have worse integrity experiences on the site, they are less likely to retain,” Haugen added.
Facebook spokesperson Drew Pusateri noted that the company has invested heavily in efforts to improve its platform.
“This criticism makes no sense on its face given nearly every document discussed details the work people did to better understand how to address our challenges,” Pusateri said in an email.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has pushed back on ideas that the company has prioritized growth over safety.
“We care deeply about issues like safety, well-being and mental health,” he said in a Facebook post early this month after Haugen’s testimony before U.S. lawmakers. “If we wanted to ignore research, why would we create an industry-leading research program to understand these important issues in the first place?”
Facebook told NBC News that it has spent $13 billion since 2016 to counter bad content and that it employs 40,000 people to work on safety and security.
Monday’s hearing took place the same day that a consortium of 17 media outlets, including NBC News, published dozens of reports based on tens of thousands of pages of leaked internal documents obtained by Haugen, which included disclosures made to the Securities and Exchange Commission and provided to Congress in redacted form by her legal counsel.
Haugen attributed many of Facebook’s failures to effectively police its platform to the company’s “culture of positivity.”
“There is a philosophy that people focus on the good,” she said. “And that’s not always a bad thing, but the problem is that when it’s so intense that it discourages people from looking at hard questions then it becomes dangerous.”
She said that Facebook employees based in Silicon Valley are likely to look at their own Facebook news feeds and see “a nice place where people are nice to each other,” and they don’t see the harms to society created elsewhere in the world, such as Ethiopia, where leaked documents show the platform is being used to spread hate speech and incite violence without adequate content moderation in several local languages.
While researchers in Facebook’s integrity teams might be acutely aware of the harms that are amplified by the platform, that information doesn’t necessarily reach executives in the company, Haugen said.
“Good news trickles up but not the bad news,” she said. “Executives see all the good they are generating and they can write off the bad as the costs of doing all the good.”
She added that the voices of employees highlighting the harms and calling for mitigation strategies “don’t get amplified internally because they are making the company grow a little slower and it’s a company that lionizes growth.”
“Frances Haugen’s evidence has so far strengthened the case for an independent regulator with the power to audit and inspect the big tech companies,” Damian Collins, a U.K. lawmaker and chair of the joint committee, said in a statement released ahead of the hearing. “There needs to be greater transparency on the decisions companies like Facebook take when they trade off user safety for user engagement.”
During Haugen’s appearance on Capitol Hill on Oct. 5, she called on lawmakers to require more transparency from the social networking giant.
“I believe that Facebook’s products harm children, stoke division, weaken our democracy and much more,” she said to the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Consumer Protection.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
