Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen didn’t hold back during Tuesday testimony before the Senate Commerce Committee, during which she argued that Facebook has shirked its responsibility to the social network’s most vulnerable users, in large part because profit is king.
Reaction from panel members on both sides of the aisle suggests that Facebook may have some regulatory headaches in its future.
Facebook is focused on growth to the detriment of projects that could make the social network a safer space for teens, marginalized communities, and those at risk of falling prey to dangerous misinformation, according to Haugen, who worked as a product manager at Facebook until earlier this year.
“Regularly, integrity projects…that were hard-fought by the teams trying to keep us safe are undone by new growth projects,” she said. “Facebook needs to take responsibility for the consequences of its choices. It needs to be willing to accept small trade-offs on profit.”
Otherwise, Facebook will remain in a vicious cycle in which it understaffs necessary projects, “which causes scandals, which then makes it harder to hire,” Haugen said. If it wants to fix its problems and attract the people who can make it happen, Facebook must “admit the truth” and declare “moral bankruptcy.”
The Buck Stops With Mark
And by Facebook, Haugen means CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
“Mark holds a very unique role in the tech industry in that he holds over 55% of all the voting shares for Facebook,” Haugen noted. “There are no similarly powerful companies that are as unilaterally controlled, and in the end, the buck stops with Mark. There’s no one currently holding Mark accountable but himself.”
Haugen argued that Zuckerberg “built an organization that is very metrics-driven, [so] metrics make the decision. Unfortunately, that itself is a decision. And in the end, if he is the CEO and the chairman of Facebook, he is responsible for those decisions.”
Facebook Global Head of Safety Director Antigone Davis appeared before the same committee last week, during which she argued that the data Haugen took from Facebook and provided to the Wall Street Journal and regulators was “not a bombshell,” something senators found surprising. Today, Sen. Richard Blumenthal—Chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety, and Data Security—said it was time Zuckerberg himself appeared before Congress to explain “what you are doing and why you did it.”
In a statement, Lena Pietsch, director of policy communications at Facebook, downplayed Haugen’s contributions to the company.
“Today, a Senate Commerce subcommittee held a hearing with a former product manager at Facebook who worked for the company for less than two years, had no direct reports, never attended a decision-point meeting with C-level executives – and testified more than six times to not working on the subject matter in question. We don’t agree with her characterization of the many issues she testified about.”
That last bit is a reference to questions from senators who quizzed Haugen on topics she did not work on at the social network, which she acknowledged during the hearing. That includes data retention, money earned per user, and issues concerning children and teen mental health.
Over to You, Congress
“Despite all this, we agree on one thing; it’s time to begin to create standard rules for the internet,” Facebook’s Pietsch added. “It’s been 25 years since the rules for the internet have been updated, and instead of expecting the industry to make societal decisions that belong to legislators, it is time for Congress to act.”
In her prepared testimony, Haugen pushed Congress to “break out of previous regulatory frames. Tweaks to outdated privacy protections or changes to Section 230 [of the Communications Decency Act] will not be sufficient.
“The core of the issue is that no one can understand Facebook’s destructive choices better than Facebook, because only Facebook gets to look under the hood,” Haugen said. “A critical starting point for effective regulation is transparency: full access to data for research not directed by Facebook. On this foundation, we can build sensible rules and standards to address consumer harms, illegal content, data protection, anticompetitive practices, algorithmic systems, and more.”
Committee members appeared willing to try. “Let’s get to work,” said Sen. John Thune, a South Dakota Republican. “I think the time has come for action, and I think you [Haugen] are the catalyst for that action,” added Sen. Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat, who blamed inaction up until this point, in part, on lobbyists.