Technology and social media have been at crossroads over the past two decades. Is Facebook a mirror? An amplifier? An inducer?
“Facebook is not a neutral platform,” whistleblower Frances Haugen said.
Haugen joined Common Sense Media founder Jim Steyer for a conversation in the Annenberg Forum at Wallis Annenberg Hall on Tuesday.
As a data scientist and former product manager on Facebook’s civic misinformation team, Haugen is known for releasing tens of thousands of Facebook’s internal documents, exposing how they handle issues such as hate speech and misinformation regarding climate change and vaccines. The negative impact Facebook and Instagram have on the mental health of children, teenagers and young adults was also revealed through a series of articles posted in September 2021 by the Wall Street Journal titled, “The Facebook Files.”
Prior to 2018, Haugen said the company was primarily focused on optimizing the amount of time users spent on the platform. When a decline in content production hit Facebook in 2018, the company decided to shift the focus of its algorithm. This algorithm change brought about a shift in Facebook that prioritized content eliciting the most interactions, such as likes, comments and shares, from users.
The way to gain the most interactions quickly became apparent to Facebook. “The fastest path to a click is anger,” Haugen said.
According to Haugen, the new algorithm implemented in 2018 resulted in content that was extreme and divisive to get...
Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma on Monday (April 6, 2026) accused Congress of unleashing a “foreign-influenced misinformation campaign” against him and his wife Riniki Bhuyan Sarma ahead ...