LISBON—“I have faith that Facebook will change,” Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen said during her first major appearance outside of TV and government hearings.
Haugen spoke here at the Web Summit conference more in sorrow than in anger, it seemed. She appeared in an onstage interview conducted by CBS correspondent Laurie Segall with Whistleblower Aid CEO Libby Liu, in a session that opened the conference as it returned to an in-person production.
“There's been a pattern of behavior at Facebook where they have consistently prioritized their own profits over our general safety,” Haugen said before noting moments later that she knows “a lot of kind, smart, and conscientious people” work there.
She emphasized that Facebook’s failings loom much larger in the rest of the world than in the US, saying that its content-moderation systems don’t work in many places overseas.
“The most fragile places in the world don't have those systems, and it's unlikely that they will have them anytime soon,” Haugen said, pointing to how many foreign languages Facebook’s AI-based moderation software doesn’t understand.
She also offered some constructive suggestions for the social network.
"Non-content solutions exist for making Facebook safer,” she said, endorsing a platform that would feel “smaller and slower” for its users instead of relying on huge groups that can generate massive engagement but are difficult to moderate. "There's such a huge opportunity for us to have social media that we enjoy that's human scale,” she said toward the end of the interview.
Haugen also urged Facebook to follow the example of Twitter and not have trust and safety staffers reporting to politically minded policy leaders. Numerous reports have documented how Facebook’s Washington-based policy team has overruled enforcement attempts against misinformation and hate speech that would have punished prominent right-wing voices.
And Haugen does not approve of Facebook’s announced pivot to a virtual-reality metaverse, calling it another case of Facebook choosing expansion into new areas over fixing existing problems. As she scornfully put it: "They're about to invest 10,000 engineers in video games."
But while finally answering “yes” to Segall’s questions about whether Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg should step down, Haugen wasn’t willing to call his underlying ambition of connecting the world fatally flawed.
"I don't hate Facebook; I love Facebook,” Haugen said. “I want it to be saved."
DisclosureDisclosure: I’m moderating four panels at Web Summit, in return for which the organizers are covering my lodging and airfare.