CNN host Jake Tapper and Facebook “whistleblower” Frances Haugen lamented that Facebook has lessened its assault on free speech.
Haugen, a data scientist and former Facebook employee, went on The Lead with Jake Tapper to express concerns that Facebook has not announced its plans to censor users, or in her words, ensure the “safety” of the 2024 elections. Tapper escalated the conversation to a whole new level. “These companies are worth billions … trillions of dollars,” he said. “They can hire more people to weed out the Nazis and take down misinformation and all that. Why don’t they?” Haugen claimed that Facebook doesn’t because it doesn’t have to, ignoring the fact that Facebook has cut back on many of its unpopular censorship rules.
“We have a problem right now that’s pretty simple: We require companies like Facebook to report their profit and their loss numbers and their expenses, like how they got to those profits, but we don’t require them to report the social side of the ledger,” Haugen complained. “If there are consequences like danger to election [sic], voter disenfranchisement, influence operations, all those things are invisible in the quarterly reports.”
Haugen inadvertently noted that social media electioneering takes time and preparation. “Preparations for the 2020 election didn't begin a month or two before the election. They began over a full year in advance,” shesaid. “We should be asking Facebook right now for what level of preparations are being done, what level of investment and demand public transparency and accountability.”
Haugen also whined about the fact that Facebook cut much of its safety researchers. “I’m deeply concerned that going into 2024 we face much larger risks than we did, say, four years ago or three years ago at this point because Facebook dissolved the team that was responsible for making sure the 2020 election was safe.”
She noted that Twitter owner Elon Musk “fired 75% of the employees” and “fired 75% of the employees” and that shortly after Facebook had layoffs. “[H]e fired over 20,000 employees. Many of my favorite safety researchers are no longer at the company, and not voluntarily. Going into the … 2024 elections, I worry that many of the people who would have kept our elections safe were cut in the name of efficiency.”
Haugen ignores the possibility that Meta is rolling back on unpopular censorship and not simply censorship related to elections. Today the platform scaled back its restrictions against certain content related to COVID-19. “We will take a more tailored approach to our COVID-19 misinformation rules consistent with the Board’s guidance and our existing policies," Meta President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg wrote in an updated Meta blog.
The platform also recently gave users more control over what content is demoted in their newsfeeds particularly when it comes to fact-checked posts, The Washington Examiner reported. “We're giving people on Facebook even more power to control the algorithm that ranks posts in their Feed. We're doing this in response to users telling us that they want a greater ability to decide what they see on our apps," a spokesperson told The Examiner.
However, Haugen’s complaints should come as no surprise. In her whistleblowing days back in 2021, she repeatedly called for more censorship and accused Facebook of prioritizing profit and free speech over the safety of users who she claimed are harmed by misinformation.
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