On Facebook Makes Us Do It
We just learned her name. It’s Frances Haugen, the ex-Facebook software engineer/whistleblower who testified in Congress that her former employer is a greedy toad of a company that exploits our divisions and does known harm to our children. This isn’t exactly a startling revelation by itself. Most of us observing social media can see how it escalates issues. Parents who are even a bit aware, realize young girls are obsessively hooked on the “look” promoted by social media. What makes Ms. Haugen’s testimony much more potent is that on her way out the door, she grabbed thousands of pages of internal human behavior studies that FB had conducted. Apparently, the documents show conclusively that not only had FB quantified the damage it was doing, but used the information to ramp up the hate and body shaming to increase usage and thereby advertising revenue. According to Ms. Haugen and her purloined records, FB intentionally stoked our hatreds and the insecurities of our teen girls for money, money, money.

Congress is in bi-partisan full pack howl over all of this. We’ve got big hearings, calls for FB to divest itself of some of its monopoly assets and promises that FB will be brought to heel. Never mind that Congress can’t seem to handle a current crop of problems of its own makings, let alone effectively determine proper oversight of a private company that is exploiting technology that most in Congress will never understand. They’ve found a new scapegoat that diverts attention away from the mess under the national Dome.

It’s not like Congress hasn’t been on this hunt before. “Big Tech” has been hauled in front of Congressional Committees and lambasted repeatedly. Beyond the jawboning, Zuckerberg, Dorsey and the host of other CEO’s have gone on, after their verbal whippings, unencumbered and fancy free. The truth is that our political leadership not only isn’t sure what to do, but they’re scared of “Big Tech”. With so many of us using these platforms, a mis-step and lots of votes could be lost. While other nations are moving aggressively to regulate FB and other social media, the company is probably safe from much oversight in the land of the brave and home of the free.

One of the most telling of Ms. Haugen’s revelations was that “we estimate that we may action as little as 3-5% of hate and ~0.6% of V&I [Violence and Incitement] on Facebook despite being the best in the world at it”. She also testified that in the runup to the January 6th Capitol insurrection, FB actually reduced its policing of hate content. Ms. Hauge’s assertion is that FB really has no intention of eliminating either hate content or reduce body shaming. In fact, FB was planning an exclusive site for pre-teens to exploit that age group further. Profits have both blinded and deafened social media.

Of course, we could stop being social media click bait. We don’t have to conduct ourselves like playground bullies every time we are on social media. We also could block the teen-harmful sites on our kids’ computers and cell phones. Want FaceBook to do better? Reduce our collective usage until they do. A good old consumer boycott that can be pretty effective. Or is social media just to powerful an influence on the human psyche and too pervasive in our lives, that it is an addition without a cure? As we continuously fail to breech our divides and the suicide rates of our kids mounts, we need to control this technology. Left totally to the private sector, Ms. Haugen has shown that we’re sitting ducks.

ihg 10-6-2021

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