Former Facebook Employee Slammed Company For “Prioritizing Profits” Over Combating Hate Speech | the Chronicle

Last Sunday, a former Facebook employee denounced the company run by Mark Zuckerberg of “Prioritize your profits” above the attention paid to issues such as combating incitement to hatred and disinformation campaigns.

Francoise Haugen , who worked as a product manager on Facebook’s civic disinformation team, made the statements on the US TV show “60 minutes” , where she was slated to be the whistleblower, used documents for a Wall Street Journal investigation and Senate hearing into Instagram’s damage to teens.

Haugen will testify before a Senate subcommittee on Tuesday in a hearing titled “Protecting children online”, on the company’s research on the effect of Instagram on young users.

“There were conflicts of interest between what was good for the public and what was good for Facebook, but the company repeatedly chose to optimize for its own interests, such as making more money.”argued Haugen.

On this line, the woman considered that “Facebook has lied to the public about the progress it has made in tackling hate speech and disinformation” on your platform.

For his part, he denounced that Facebook was used to help organize the riots that took place on January 6 on Capitol Hill in Washington, after the company deactivated security systems after the presidential elections in the United States. .

Faced with these accusations, the voice of Facebook Lena Pietsch stated in response to Haugen that they were following “Make significant improvements to combat the spread of disinformation and harmful content” and suggesting that they promote bad content without doing anything to change this situation “this is not true” .