Facebook still has a huge problem with spreading misinformation throughout the world, said Frances Haugen, former product manager turned Facebook Whistleblower.
“The problem at Facebook is not about bad people or bad ideas it’s about giving the most reach to the people with the most extreme ideas,” Haugen said.
Haugen
spoke at South by Southwest on Tuesday morning. Facebook CEO and Founder Mark Zuckerberg spoke virtually via camera, in an afternoon session but didn’t mention any of the issues Haugen raised. Instead, he focused on the rebranding of the company to Meta and its focus on creating tools for the emerging Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality 3-D world known as the Metaverse.
In her talk, Haugen said she joined Facebook in 2019 after a Facebook recruiter reached out to her. She worked on a team focused on civic misinformation. It was an extremely personal issue, she said. She had lost connection with a close friend who went down a rabbit hole of misinformation.
Before joining Facebook, Haugen worked as a product manager at Google, Pinterest, and Yelp. Her job largely focused on algorithmic products and recommendation systems like the one that powers the Facebook news feed.
In her job, Haugen began to see Facebook prioritize profits over safety. She realized that the company also misrepresented how it was dealing with the problems of hate speech, violence, teenage mental health, human trafficking, and misinformation on its platform to the public, investors, and the...
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