Ireland’s Online Safety Bill must include mechanisms that forces Facebook to publish data and increase transparency, a Facebook whistleblower has told an Oireachtas committee.
Frances Haugen said the Bill should include forced transparency as self-regulation of the social media giant does not work.
Appearing remotely before the the Oireachtas Tourism, Culture, Arts, Sport and Media Committee, Ms Haugen said there is a “major national security problem” with Facebook and its lack of transparency.
She also said the Government should order an independent review of the Data Protection Commission.
“There is a major, major, major national security problem with Facebook with regard to lack of transparency,” Ms Haugen added.
“It needs to include mandatory force transparency, like the (Europe) Digital Services Act does.
“Unless we have forced transparency, we will not in any way adequately find those influence operations that Russia uses to destabilise free societies.
“Unless we have mandated transparency, unless the public has the right to ask questions and get real validated data in return on an ongoing basis, they’re going to tell you they can’t give you this data monthly or weekly. And that’s a lie.
“Because if they write the code once to pull this information, they have systems that allow them to run it every day if they want to.
“It’s basically free.”
Ms Haugen warned that without mandated transparency, there will not be an acceptable level of public safety.
Ms Haugen said...
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