Written by: Patrick Novak, Staff Writer
WHISTLEBLOWER: Former Facebook employee leaks documents exposing sensitive information.
Former product manager at Facebook, Frances Haugen, quit her job and made copies of tens of thousands of internal research belonging to Facebook. Due to the controversial nature of the documents, Haugen shared them with Congress as well as the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The internal research documents included information on a wide variety of topics including their inability to control how misinformation spreads, the retention of users, human trafficking, and misinformation in India specifically.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on Monday, October 18 that they will be working to fix many problems within the application, most notably their problems with engaging a younger audience. The documents leaked by Haugen had gone over this same issue; they stated that there was a 13 percent decline of teen users since the year 2019. They had also predicted that there will continue to be a decrease of teenage users over the next two years by 45 percent.
The leaked documents also provided insight into the company’s awareness of the platform’s problem with misinformation and hate speech. In 2019 a fake account in India was made by Facebook for research purposes regarding how the platform’s tools affect users. In under three weeks, this fake account had begun to spread fake news and harmful images. Employees of Facebook admit in the documents that it’s the company’s own fault for failing to properly handle situations regarding fake news and the inception of several radical political groups that originated on Facebook. This information is especially disconcerting considering the way the company has minimized the platform’s issues with the rapid spread of misinformation and its significant effects on the world.
The documents also reveal how Facebook attempted to handle their massive issues with human trafficking. Apple threatened to remove Facebook as well as Instagram from the App Store in 2019, which prompted the company to make major changes to their platform regarding the issue. They removed a plethora of posts that had ties to human trafficking and made changes to their policy; this kept them from being removed from the App Store but it did not solve the problem. Some of the documents even reveal that Facebook has been aware of these problems since 2018 but did not choose to attempt to fix these issues until Apple threatened the company’s livelihood.
This is just one in a series of scandals regarding Facebook from the past several years. The controversy has not affected Facebook’s place on the stock market and the site is still incredibly popular. Is this just another bump in the road for them or could this possibly lead to the downfall of the entire company?
Whistleblower and former Facebook product manager Frances Haugen