Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen has warned of the “existential risk” that irresponsible social media companies like X and Meta pose for society, in a talk with journalism students.
The data scientist warned that social media companies are not being compelled to provide online safety, and had cut deeply the number of staff monitoring for hate speech, misinformation and violent imagery.
She criticised X and Meta CEOs Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg for putting profits over safety.
“Elon came through and fired half of his employees and 25 per cent quit. And he proved there would be no consequences to cutting safety,” she said.
“And Mark followed up by firing 20,000 people, and all my favourite researchers are not the company anymore.”
In 2021, Haugen became a whistleblower, leaking tens of thousands of documents from Facebook to The Wall Street Journal and the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
Hired initially as part of the Civic Integrity team at Facebook, she became disillusioned after it was axed in 2020, following the US elections that year.
Haugen said she believed the cuts were a factor in recent political instability in the US, including the January 6, 2021, violent occupation of the Capitol building.
Her warning comes as Meta threatens to ban news content from Facebook and Instagram in Australia, after it backed out of funding the News Media Bargaining Code, an agreement that large technology platforms like Meta pay local news publishers for their news content.
Similar legislation in Canada, the Online News Act, led to Meta banning news on Facebook and Instagram there last year.
We are so fundamentally dependent on one man who has all the cards, and that is an existential risk for all of humanity.
Haugen questioned the personal motivations of Musk and Zuckerberg’s leadership.
“Elon was intoxicated one day and was like, ‘this seems like a good idea’,” she said, about his purchase of Twitter in April 2022, which he later renamed X.
“And it got stuck. Because it became very clear that once he started doing due diligence that he was like, ‘what have I done?'”
She said Zuckerberg was tainted.
“Mark went from being the person who saved humanity, who made the Arab Spring happen, to six months later [being] the person who was threatening the world,” she said. “He’s never really gonna come back from that.
“We are so fundamentally dependent on one man who has all the cards, and that is an existential risk for all of humanity.”
The 39-year-old now works with governments to provide context on the potential dangers of social media, and was visiting Australia to meet with different state and private organisations and attend the NSW and South Australian Governments’ Social Media Summit in October.
Haugen spoke to UTS journalism students on a visit to the Central News newsroom and warned that the rising risk of misinformation on social media isn’t limited to the United States, but has impacted Australia.
“During the referendum, Indigenous communities in Australia had been complaining for six months that in the US, if you use a racial slur, it gets taken down,” she added.
“It was almost certainly because the systems that were meant to go find those racial slurs had never been localised to Australia, and they spent six months complaining about this.
Frances Haugen speaks with students in Central News. Photo: Rodger Liang.
“Meta came out and said, ‘we are going to solve that’. And it’s like, ‘okay, great. The election is [in] like three days’.”
Haugen claimed instead of more effective and complex safety systems reliant on human guidance, the primary instrument for online safety was censorship.
“Even having the right to even know what kind of safety systems exist, because right now, we’re in a framework where the only thing companies are thinking about is safety through censorship,” she said.
“There’s a whole other world of tools we have available that’s through design. That’s the most effective way.
“But let’s just start with saying, if you’re going to rely on censorship, you have to disclose it.”
Despite her warnings, Haugen remains optimistic about the future of social media, citing past technology reshaping communication and society.
“The reason why we feel overwhelmed right now is because we are actually responsible for learning and responding like every other time before,” she said.
“Now it’s our job to go in there and figure out how we live with these technologies.”
Main image by Rodger Liang.
