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The person responsible for the leak of a series of confidential Facebook investigations revealed his identity on Sunday.
This is Frances Haugen, 37, who worked as a product manager on Facebook’s civic integrity team.
In an interview with US network CBS’s 60 Minutes, he said the documents he leaked showed the company repeatedly putting “growth before security” for its users.
Facebook claimed the leak was misleading, a skewed interpretation of the data, and ignored positive research. by the company.
In the interview, Haugen said he quit Facebook earlier this year after being enraged by the company. Before leaving, he copied a series of memos and internal documents.
The whistleblower then shared thousands of pages of those documents with the Wall Street Journal, which published the material in part over the past three weeks. The disclosure was referred to as “Facebook files” or Facebook files.
The disclosures included documents showing prominent celebrities, politicians and Facebook users being treated differently by the company.
Facebook reportedly applied the moderation policies known as XCheck (cross-checking) differently to these accounts, or not at all, according to the leaks.
Another leak revealed the complex lawsuit of a group of its own shareholders against Facebook.
The group alleges, among other things, that Facebook’s $ 5 billion payment to the United States Federal Trade Commission to resolve the Cambridge Analytica data scandal was so high because it was designed to protect founder Mark Zuckerberg.
But it was the accusations on Instagram that particularly troubled US politicians.
An internal investigation by Facebook (owner of Instagram) found this social network to affect adolescent mental health, but did not share their findings even when they suggested the platform was a place “Toxic” to many young people.
According to documents published by the Wall Street Journal, 32% of teens polled said that when they felt bad in their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse.
Haugen to testify before a US Senate subcommittee on Tuesday in an audience titled “Protecting Kids Online” linked to the company’s research into the effect of Instagram on the mental health of young users.
Facebook’s head of global security, Antigone Davis, testified before U.S. senators last week. He said the leaks failed to highlight the platform’s positive impact on teens.
Haugen, for his part, condemns what his former employer did.
“There were conflicts of interest between what was good for the public and what was good for Facebook,” he said.
“Facebook has repeatedly chosen to optimize it for its own interests, to make more money.”
Haugen also spoke of riots at the Capitol in January, stating that Facebook helped fuel the violence.
He said Facebook activated security systems to reduce disinformation during the US election, but only temporarily.
“As soon as the elections ended, they abandoned them, or changed the parameters to what they were before, to prioritize growth over security, and it really looks like a betrayal of democracy.”
The platform’s vice president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, told US media CNN that it was ridiculous to suggest that Facebook was responsible for the riots.
“I think it gives people a false consolation assume that there must be a technological or technical explanation for the problems of political polarization in the United States, ”he said.
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