Facebook is putting profit before public good, says whistleblower

Facebook is putting profit before public good, says whistleblower
‘There were conflicts of interest between what was good for the public and what was good for Facebook,’ says Frances Haugen. Source: Reuters
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Daily US Times: Frances Haugen, a former employee of Facebook, came forward as the whistleblower who leaked a cache of internal documents to the US newspaper the Wall Street Journal, days before she is set to testify before US lawmakers.

In an interview with 60 Minutes, the former Facebook employee discussed her decision to speak out about the internal workings of the social media giant, saying she had become alarmed by what she understood that company policies that prioritized profit over public safety.

Haugen said: “There were conflicts of interest between what was good for the public and what was good for Facebook. And Facebook, over and over again, chose to optimize for its own interests, like making more money.”

On Sunday, she said the documents she collected and shared with the US law enforcement and Wall Street Journal show Facebook is lying to the public that it is making significant progress against violence, hatespeech and misinformation.

She said: “The version of Facebook that exists today is tearing our societies apart and causing ethnic violence around the world.”

After spending more than a decade working in the tech industry, including at Google and Pinterest, Haugen was recruited to join Facebook in 2019.

She agreed to join the tech giant only if she could work to help the company combat misinformation, according to her, saying the issue was personal for her – she previously lost a relationship with a friend after they descended into online conspiracies.

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