DUBLIN — Facebook needs to stop organizing users into huge "like-minded" herds because Russia exploits this profit-maximizing policy to fuel divisions in Ukraine and weaken democracies worldwide, whistleblower Frances Haugen told Irish lawmakers today.
Haugen said when she was part of Facebook’s front-line threat intelligence unit, she could see how Russian accounts using fake profiles tapped into Facebook groups containing potentially a million users and fed them diets of incendiary propaganda.
But she said that, because of Facebook’s culture of secrecy, nobody but Facebook insiders have any ability to identify such “influence operations” run by Russia as well as China and Iran.
“There is a major, major, major national security problem with Facebook with regard to its lack of transparency,” Haugen said.
“This is a very commonly used technique by Russia for influencing how politics works in its neighboring countries, in places around the world,” she said. “It’s used by China, by Iran, by our major adversaries who have come in and said: We’re going to weaponize one of the most powerful things about Western countries — their openness.”
The main resource for exposing such division-stoking weaknesses on Facebook, she said, remains Twitter. She praised Twitter’s willingness to make data on tweets public for independent analysis.
“I was shocked to find out that many influence operations on Facebook were caught via Twitter, because Twitter made data available and Facebook...
A wave of pro-whistleblower opinions from federal judges suggests the False Claims Act remains on solid ground despite pointed questions from leading conservative judicial voices. Whistleblowers, ...