Whistleblower Frances Haugen will give congressional testimony later this week about internal Facebook research and communications she gave to the SEC, in the form of tens of thousands of pages that document the company’s deliberate and deceitful amplification of hate, violence, and disinformation to maintain ad revenue and profits, across all its social media network properties. A former product manager at Facebook, Haugen gave an interview with CBS News 60 Minutes that was broadcast last night.
Additional interview segments are available online, in which she goes into more detail about how management chose not to sufficiently staff and later shut down the team assembled to protect users around the world from authoritarian governments, including users targeted by China. She discusses the company’s algorithmic prioritization of user engagement with malicious content, and the very real, violent consequences of this decision as it plays out in markets served by Facebook, around the world — including the Myanmar genocide and the January 6, 2021 Trump insurrection.