Facebook Whistleblower Reveals Herself in Network Interview

She's a leftwinger who wants more censorship.

As I've said before: FaceBook, being an illegal monopoly which is only tolerated upon the condition it serve the political interests of the hard left, must be broken up. It is permitted by the left to remain a tolerated monopoly only because, in this perilous state, it can always be pressured to censor the right and propagate the messaging of the left.

It's like allowing a Republican senator who has a packet of blackmail material against him to continue "serving" the Republican party.

I mean, yeah, we do that too, but we shouldn't keep every compromised actor in positions of power.

The whistleblower repeats her central claim that FaceBook has organized its precious algorithm to create as much anger and stress as possible, because this boosts "engagement" and makes the fading social media behemoth more "sticky" and more profitable.

She also shrieks that FaceBook isn't censoring the right enough and that's how we got the Four Hour Insurrection.

The Facebook whistleblower revealed her identity last night, along with her plans to reform the embattled social media company from the outside. Frances Haugen, a data scientist by training and a veteran of Google and Pinterest, had been recruited to Facebook in 2018 to help the platform prepare for election interference. When she quit in May, she took with her a cache of tens of thousands of documents that now underpin a sweeping congressional investigation into Facebook's practices.

But Haugen's turning point came months earlier, on December 2, 2020, less than a month after the presidential election, when the company disbanded the Civic Integrity team she worked on.

"They told us, 'We're dissolving Civic Integrity.' Like, they basically said, 'Oh good, we made it through the election. There wasn't riots. We can get rid of Civic Integrity now.' Fast forward a couple months, we got the insurrection," Haugen told CBS's 60 Minutes, referring to the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol. "And when they got rid of Civic Integrity, it was the moment where I was like, 'I don't trust that they're willing to actually invest what needs to be invested to keep Facebook from being dangerous.'"

Either we specify, formally, what Facebook must and must not censor, or it will continue making these decisions based on both overt public pressure from Democrat politicians (who can pass legislation adverse to it) and from behind-the-scenes threats from the Democrats and their power elites.

Fake conservative nostalgists such as National Review continue to insist that FaceBook is making its censorship decisions of its own free will, and we need to respect this monopoly corporation's rights to free speech and corporate autonomy.

They continue pretending that FaceBook's decision matrix isn't heavily influenced by the constant overt threats by the political left to break it up unless FaceBook censors political messaging it doesn't like.

And they pretend that partly out of nostalgia and delusion for the last year everything made sense to them -- 2003 -- and partly because they're straight-up being paid off by Google and FaceBook and money-laundering operations like the Chamber of Commerce and AEI, which are also being paid off by Google and FaceBook.

...

Haugen traces Facebook’s recent problems to a significant change the company made in 2018 to the News Feed algorithm, which prioritizes the content that is shown to users. Those changes, she said, pushed divisive content to users because that’s what drove engagement and profits. "Facebook has realized that if they change the algorithm to be safer, people will spend less time on the site, they’ll click on less ads, they'll make less money," she told CBS.

The company rolled out new safety systems for the 2020 election, but Haugen said they were turned off shortly thereafter. "As soon as the election was over, they turned them back off or they changed the settings back to what they were before to prioritize growth over safety," she said. "And that really feels like a betrayal of democracy to me."

Constant censorship, propaganda, and surveillance by mega-monopolies serving the Ruling Class and its vicious ideology sound like betrayals of democracy to me.

Being on the Civic Integrity team meant that Haugen was intimately familiar with much of Facebook's research into the various problems its platforms faced, from disinformation to incitements to violence and more. While some of the research dates back a few years, other studies were published this year, including one that says, "We estimate that we may action as little as 3-5% of hate and about 6-tenths of 1% of V & I [violence and incitement] on Facebook despite being the best in the world at it."

...

Once she knew that she couldn’t fix the company from the inside, she decided to copy as many files as she could that related problems like violence, hate speech, and mental health. "At some point in 2021, I realized, 'Okay, I
m gonna have to do this in a systemic way, and I have to get out enough that no one can question that this is real.'"

Haugen's leaked documents form the basis of eight complaints filed by her attorneys with the Securities and Exchange Commission. They allege Facebook breached its fiduciary duty by not revealing information that was material to investors. The filings give Haugen some protection as a whistleblower, but because she also leaked the documents to the press, she may not enjoy complete immunity from legal action on the part of Facebook.

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal newly reports that Mark Zuckerberg planned to make his illegal monopoly the world's most powerful vaccine propaganda operation in the world, but was frustrated by FaceBook users -- I mean, those used by FaceBook -- who weren't keen on the vaccine.

So of course he's turned to even more serious censorship against them.

In mid-March, Mark Zuckerberg used his Facebook page to announce a goal that was both ambitious and personal. He wanted his company to use its formidable resources to push 50 million people toward Covid-19 vaccines.

In a post and a press release, the chief executive discussed Facebook Inc.'s initiatives to promote vaccines. He unveiled collaborations with global health organizations. And he touted that his company had "already connected more than 2 billion people to authoritative Covid-19 information."

Inside Facebook, staffers were warning that Mr. Zuckerberg's own platform, the globe-spanning powerhouse built on code he wrote 17 years ago, was compromising his effort.

For more than a month, Facebook researchers warned that comments on vaccine-related posts--often factual posts of the sort Facebook sought to promote--were filled with antivaccine rhetoric aimed at undermining their message, internal documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal show. The comments ranged from personal objections all the way to debunked falsehoods and conspiracy theories.
The wave of negative comments worried global health institutions, including the World Health Organization and Unicef, the documents say. One internal Facebook memo cited "anti-vaccine commenters that swarm their Pages."

In the weeks before Mr. Zuckerberg made his announcement, another memo said initial testing concluded that roughly 41% of comments on English-language vaccine-related posts risked discouraging vaccinations. Users were seeing comments on vaccine-related posts 775 million times a day, the memo said, and Facebook researchers worried the large proportion of negative comments could influence perceptions of the vaccines' safety.

Any statement which isn't 100% positive propaganda for the vaccine "risks discouraging" vaccinations.

Which is of course now the standard for what must be censored. If you're not 100% a propagandist for mandatory vaccinations, you "risk discouraging" them and must be censored.

...

By this summer, the prevalence of false and misleading vaccine information on Facebook prompted a public scolding from President Biden, who said the falsehoods were "killing people."

Again, I repeat: Either Republicans join a process to formally, officially declare what FaceBook can and cannot censor -- the simplest fix is to just impose standard American first amendment jurisprudence on the monopoly, which has the advantage of being a very well-litigated body of law which most people can understand at the cost of hiring a couple of first amendment lawyers -- or we will continue to suffer under the regime in which only the hard left informally, unofficially dictates to FaceBook what it must censor.

By the way, such a formal, official government policy on what FaceBook can and cannot censor -- a "safe harbor" of conduct that would protect it from liability-- would be very helpful to FaceBook as well, giving it the confidence and legal right to tell the left to f*** off during their pressure campaigns.

FaceBook's stock fell 4% today due to the publicization of the whistleblower's claims and her allegations about FaceBook harming investors by lying to them about its internal reports and potential libilities.

Facebook stock fell as much as 4% on Monday after a whistleblower alleged that the company does little to stop the spread of hateful content on its platform.

Former Facebook product manager Frances Haugen leaked internal documents to several news outlets this year and told "60 Minutes" on Sunday that 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 told "60 Minutes."

posted by Ace at 03:30 PM

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