AUSTIN (Nexstar) — Former Facebook employee Frances Haugen captured the world’s attention in Oct. 2021 when she went public with complaints that the company’s own research shows how it magnifies hate and misinformation. On Monday, the Facebook whistleblower spoke at South by Southwest to further draw attention to issues she said the media giant has yet to address.
Haugen, who worked at Google and Pinterest before joining Facebook (now Meta) in 2019, said she had asked to work in an area of the company that fights misinformation after losing a friend to online conspiracy theories.
“It’s really easy to be dismissive of the severity of misinformation. But I lived with watching a college-educated, smart, insightful, funny person, go down the rabbit hole,” she said. “That made me realize that once we begin to not have an ability to have shared facts … we don’t have a path back to reconciliation.”
In April 2018, CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified before Congress with promises that artificial intelligence, or AI, technology would be the solution for misbehavior on Facebook, like fake news, propaganda and hate speech.
“Over the long term, building AI tools is going to be the scalable way to identify and root out most of this harmful content,” Zuckerberg told lawmakers in the 10-hour hearing.
During her panel at SXSW, Haugen refuted this and criticized Facebook’s reliance on AI as means for fact checking and regulating content on its platform.
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