Imagine what it’s like to work at Facebook this week. For about five years much of the world has slowly turned against the service that once promised to connect the world and spread democracy and cookies and puppies and such. But this week, in the wake of revelations of serious malfeasance and moral irresponsibility by Facebook’s leaders, it must be unbearable to face friends and family, even distant Facebook friends.
In recent days, Frances Haugen, a former member of Facebook’s “civic integrity team”, has launched a deft and professional public assault on the company. Unlike previous Facebook whistleblowers, like former Facebook data scientist Sophie Zhang, Haugen managed to capture the interest and attention of policy leaders and journalists around the world. We have to ask why Haugen has had so much traction and impact when Zhang, who was fired for raising objections within the company to Facebook’s human rights problems, did not.
The most straightforward answer is that Haugen pushed forward a problem that strikes the concerns of many – if not most – parents in the developed world: Instagram’s influence on the prevalence of eating disorders, self-harm and suicide among teenaged girls. This was an issue that Americans, especially, understand and recoil against.
Zhang, in contrast, raised issues that Americans tend not to worry about: the fates of people beyond the United States. Zhang broke publicly with Facebook in April 2021 when she sat for a stirring interview with Guardian reporter Julia Carrie Wong. That followed a September 2020 revelation by BuzzFeed News that Zhang had posted on her internal Facebook page a long farewell memo excoriating the company for ignoring or denying how easily and successfully authoritarian leaders and movements had hijacked Facebook’s services to undermine or overthrow democracies.
“In the three years I’ve spent at Facebook,” Zhang wrote, “I’ve found multiple blatant attempts by foreign national governments to abuse our platform on vast scales to mislead their own citizenry, and caused international news on multiple occasions.” She cited problems in Azerbaijan, Honduras, India, Ukraine, Spain, Brazil, Bolivia and Ecuador. Zhang showed how countries like Azerbaijan and Honduras, which are important enough for Facebook to push for growth in membership, are not important enough for Facebook to limit the spread of manipulative fake accounts that pump up authoritarian leaders. In other words, the people of Azerbaijan are worth something to Facebook only for their clicks, not for their lives or freedoms.
Had US senators and producers at 60 Minutes cared about the people of Honduras, we might have had this moment back in April, when Zhang spoke to the Guardian and showed Wong documentation that supported her assertions.
Documents matter. But some documents matter more than others. In addition to the subject matter being different, Haugen released reports from Facebook’s research wing, a team devoted to social science and data analytics that is supposed to help the company’s leaders understand the consequences of their policies and technological designs. Those documents, which the Wall Street Journal reported on in a stirring series of stories two weeks ago, show a disturbing pattern of nonchalance among top Facebook executives. They did not care about the health of teenage girls. They did not care to stop the international soccer star Neymar from vindictively distributing nude images of a woman who had accused him of rape. They did not want to make major internal changes to how Facebook Groups work to stem the flow of anti-vaccine misinformation. These documents, generated by the research group within Facebook, show that Facebook executives knew about all this damage and the extent to which Facebook contributed to it. That made Haugen’s campaign more successful than Zhang’s even before anyone had heard of Haugen.
Campaign strategy matters. Haugen led with the documents and let the Wall Street Journal dig into them, raising the issues before her identity or biography. However, once she appeared on 60 Minutes on Sunday, Haugen became the story – or so Facebook executives hoped.
Like they did with Zhang, Facebook executives immediately tried to portray Haugen as less important to the company than she was. Facebook’s spectacularly bad public relations department parried that Haugen worked for Facebook for only two years, never met with its top leaders, and did not produce any of the documents she released. Of course, Haugen never claimed anything else. She made Facebook Research the protagonist. Facebook is trying to make the issue about Haugen’s resume, which could not be more beside the point.
Meanwhile, Nick Clegg – the former leader of the British Liberal Democrats, who now leads Facebook’s global public affairs office with as much skill and success as he led his party – embarrassed himself on American television when he objected to the comparison of Facebook to tobacco companies by pointing out that Facebook is spectacularly popular, as if tobacco had not also once been popular. The fact that both have addictive properties did not seem to occur to the former statesman.
On Wednesday, Mark Zuckerberg sent a memo to Facebook staff defending the company against Haugen’s testimony while avoiding any of the issues the leaked reports from Facebook Research revealed. “The argument that we deliberately push content that makes people angry for profit is deeply illogical,” Zuckerberg said in the memo.
Except that Haugen didn’t exactly say that. “Deliberately” is the key here. She explained, as many scholars and even Facebook executives themselves have, that content that generates strong “engagement” (clicks, shares, likes and comments) spreads farther and faster than posts that do not. It just so happens that anger is a basic human emotion. So posts from friends and family that spark indignation tend to generate a lot of clicks, shares, likes and comments.
Facebook may not deliberately spread divisive and destructive posts. But it’s in the design anyway. So it happens, and Facebook knows it happens. But to stop it, Facebook would have to completely redesign itself and abandon its original sin: a commitment to maximize engagement and growth. Zuckerberg would never do that.
Perhaps the most disappointing reaction came from Monika Bickert, a once-respected attorney and diplomat who is now head of Global Policy Management at Facebook. In response to the very real and documented harm that Instagram does to untold numbers of teenage girls and young women, Bickert said, “the majority of young people on Instagram are having a good experience”.
This is stunning. It’s sickening, really. As Haugen pointed out, only ten percent of smokers ever get lung cancer, yet we now know – largely because of leaked corporate documents – that tobacco companies knew all along that they were killing people, even if (cough cough) the majority of smokers died from something else.
We should expect many more defections and resignations from Facebook in the days to come. With such amoral leadership, it must be difficult for so many talented people to go to work there every day.
We should never really expect corporate leaders to act in the public interest. But we can and should expect them to tell the full and unvarnished truth. Fortunately for the public, Facebook officials are so bad at varnishing that the truth comes through despite their best efforts to obscure it.
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Siva Vaidhyanathan is the Robertson professor of media studies at the University of Virginia and the author of Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy