Thanks for your comment. You make some good points. Zuckerberg's comment about the incentives of leaking research is certainly worthy of consideration. And while I don't have first hand experience with Brexit, I do not mean to claim that the disagreements were caused by FB. Only that FB may have had a role in causing people to become more entrenched in their positions.

One of the points I'm making is that Zuckerberg's statement lacks specifics in the form of numbers and data. I think it'd be interesting to read a point-by-point rhetorical analysis of his statement.

Also, because of this, yes, I don't know how much Facebook spends on research. I agree that though money and research quality are quite likely correlated, it's very hard to say by how much. That being said, I care a whole lot more about the values of the company. Haugen's testimony paints a textbook picture of a values problem. The whistleblower has repeatedly said, under oath, that Facebook understaffs its security and safety teams, and that they turned off the safety and integrity protections after the election, and more.

It's also true that civic divisions in the US -- not to mention other social problems -- run much deeper than Facebook. One mechanism people like me are concerned about is how users are recommended people to follow or content that results in either more division or them being led to a more extreme version of their views. In her testimony, Haugen gave the example of how indicating an interest in healthier eating on IG can lead recommendations of anorexia / eating disorder content. Saying that Facebook's engagement-based-ranking has nothing to do with promoting civil divisions seems to me like saying that the Youtube recommendation algorithm a few years back had nothing to do with the rise of the modern flat earth movement. Researchers have evidence that it did [0].

As for ethnic conflict in Ethiopia, I only bring it up because of Haugen's testimony. As this Guardian article puts it, "Haugen warned that Facebook was 'literally fanning ethnic violence' in places such as Ethiopia because it was not policing its service adequately outside the US." [1]. Your comment does make me wonder how many people in Ethiopia have access to the internet though.

This is a slight tangent, but it's also worth mentioning that re: IG and mental health... we don't know about other research, like about any further attempts at a causal study -- most of what's been cited is correlational and comes from small sample-sized interviews. So it would be nice to see larger and more rigorous studies. I don't believe that research should stop with question "Is Instagram Harmful." Of course that's going to have a mixed answer when dealing with large masses of people. "Who is susceptible to being harmed?", "By what mechanisms is IG harmful to some people?" etc. are questions that need answers.

I also disagree that people are so biased against FB/IG that anything they do will be seen in a bad light. Were they to tweak the IG recommendation algorithm so that an interest in healthier eating did not lead to anorexia content, people like myself would applaud. And though I am not an activist, I'm generally interested in (the enabling of) wholesome discussions and interactions, i.e. things that promote a feeling of being in a community / society rather than feeling apart from it.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/feb/17/study-blames...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/oct/07/facebooks...