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Frances Haugen, a former Facebook product manager with appearances at several other big tech companies, went public with an appearance on “60 Minutes” and testified before a US Senate subcommittee on Tuesday.
The select committee is also keen to hear from Haugen, CNN has learned, as she could provide insight into how Facebook was used to ultimately facilitate the violence that occurred on the U.S. Capitol on Jan.6.
On Monday, House of Intelligence Speaker Adam Schiff, a Californian Democrat who is on the select panel, tweeted that the select committee “will have to hear it [Haugen], and get inside information from Facebook to flesh out their role. “
“According to this Facebook whistleblower, the closure of the civic integrity team and the deactivation of election disinformation tools contributed to the January 6 insurgency,” he said.
A senior Facebook (FB) The executive said in “Reliable Sources” on Sunday that the company would never be able to control all of its site’s content and may be open to regulation as lawmakers continue to crack down on the tech giant. Facebook’s vice president of global affairs Nick Clegg was pushing back after last week’s damning Wall Street Journal investigation based on internal documents provided by Haugen revealed the company was aware of the issues on its platforms.
“If the claim is that Jan. 6 can be explained because of social media, I just think that’s ridiculous,” Clegg said on Sunday’s “Reliable Sources” show. “The responsibility for the January 6 violence and insurgency that day lies squarely with the people who inflicted the violence and those who encouraged it, including then President Trump and, frankly, many other people elsewhere in the media who encouraged the claim that the election was stolen.
Clegg said he believes “it gives people false comfort to assume that there must be a technological or technical explanation for the problems of political polarization in the United States.”
In August, the select committee sent letters to 15 social media companies, including Facebook, YouTube and Twitter (TWTR), seeking to understand how disinformation and efforts to overthrow the elections by foreign and domestic actors existed on their platforms.
The panel specifically requested data and analysis on domestic violent extremists affiliated with efforts to overthrow the 2020 election, particularly around the January 6 attack.
– Brian Stelter contributed to this report
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