AUSTIN, Texas--A former Facebook (now Meta) employee-turned-whistleblower shocked the world when she disclosed tens of thousands of internal documents she took from the company.
Frances Haugen exposed more than 20,000 pages of internal documents from the social networking giant.
What is contained in them provided information on many problems, such as Facebook’s algorithms to select items to pop up and rank them, which drew huge criticism for accelerating social divides and causing adverse psychological effects on youths.
In a recent interview with The Asahi Shimbun, Haugen spoke about how people should deal with giant social media services. She emphasized that Facebook should fulfill its responsibility and suggested measures for more transparency.
Excerpts of the interview follow:
Question: You pointed out that after Facebook changed its algorithm in 2018, more anger and false information became easier to spread. What surprised me when I read the Facebook documents was that employees had been discussing this for years and couldn’t make a decent improvement.
Haugen: There is a document in November 2020, where Facebook says, we’re going to start valuing anger less. If you look at the comment thread on that document, it’s huge. People were like, “Oh, finally, we’ve only been saying this for 18 months.” And about six weeks later, they released the final weights, where they’re like, “OK, this is what we’re actually going to do for the recalibration, and that had gone away.” If...
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