In her opening remarks at a Senate subcommittee hearing with a Facebook whistle-blower on Tuesday, Senator Marsha Blackburn from Tennessee made a stunning allegation.
“News broke yesterday that the private data of over 1.5 billion — that’s right, 1.5 billion — Facebook users is being sold on a hacking forum,” Ms. Blackburn, the subcommittee’s ranking Republican member, said. “That’s its biggest data breach to date.”
The problem is that the breach that Ms. Blackburn referenced is largely unverified, and possibly fake. The claim comes from an anonymous account on a forum that, according to Vice, obtained access to the database from a supposed company called “X2Emails.” The anonymous post, from Sept. 22, promised “scraped” data on “more than 1.5b Database of Facebook” consisting of users’ email addresses, locations, phone numbers, and other identifying information.
Some news outlets reported on the breach as fact, but there is no proof yet of a hack. Aric Toler, a researcher with Bellingcat, an investigative journalism group, pointed out that someone claimed to have paid for the supposedly hacked information and found out that it was a scam.
“Maybe it’s real, but no reason to breathlessly report it like this,” he wrote.
This tweet is based on a two-week-old thread on RaidForums. In that same thread, someone recently posted that they paid the OP for this alleged data and was scammed.
Maybe it’s real, but no reason to breathlessly report it like this. https://t.co/nat3VosMqd
— Aric Toler (@AricToler) October 4, 2021
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Ms. Haugen talked about the dangers of “engagement-based ranking,” which is a fancy way of describing the ways that Facebook, and other social platforms, use algorithms to prioritize posts based on how many likes, shares and comments they generate. She contrasted it with iMessage, Apple’s text messaging platform, which ranks messages chronologically, in order of when they arrived. And she said that in addition to boosting harmful, hyper-engaging content in the U.S., Facebook’s engagement-based ranking system is “literally fanning ethnic violence” in places like Ethiopia.
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Facebook has begun to push back on Ms. Haugen’s testimony — in real time. Andy Stone, a Facebook spokesman, tweeted that the witness “did not work on child safety or Instagram or research these issues and has no direct knowledge of the topic from her work at Facebook.” We’ll see how far that goes to challenge the testimony.
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Despite being battered by lawmakers all morning, Facebook seems unaffected. Since the hearing began, its share price has risen 2 percent to roughly $332 and continues to push upward.
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There’s a mention of Jan. 6th, following questioning from Ms. Klobuchar. Ms. Haugen said Facebook turned off safeguards that had been engaged during the election, following the vote “because they wanted that growth back” and “they went back to their original defaults.”
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Senator Amy Klobuchar made a reference to Mr. Zuckerberg’s recent sailing trip, which he documented in a video on his Facebook page. It was the third or fourth angry mention of sailing so far today.
Practically every lawmaker in Washington says that Facebook needs to be regulated.
But how? That’s where opinions vary widely.
The last major internet law was adopted more than 30 years ago. And legislators struggle with new laws that can protect users — including teenagers — that don’t also curb free expression. For decades, U.S. legislators have debated data privacy laws, which exist in Europe and several states, but have not agreed on a federal regulation.
The greatest activity is coming from antitrust enforcement, with cases to break up Facebook and Google winding through courts. President Biden’s new team of antitrust enforcers, led by Lina Khan at the Federal Trade Commission, promises to hobble the dominant power of Amazon, Facebook and Google to solve broader problems of poor labor conditions, income inequality and climate change.
“I do think Congress can get something done on antitrust and tech,” said Paul Gallant, an analyst at Cowen research. “But I’m not seeing anything that suggests they’ll act on content moderation, which people actually care a lot more about.”
The whistle-blower at the center of Tuesday’s hearing, Frances Haugen, is expected to push for laws that address algorithmic amplification of harmful content. Such laws could force companies like Facebook to share with academics and the public data on how their ranking systems for content work and how hate speech spreads on the sites. One bill already proposed by Representative Anna Eshoo, Democrat of California, would give the F.T.C. more authority to regulate behavioral advertising, Facebook’s core business model.
“The severity of this crisis demands that we break out of previous regulatory frames,” Ms. Haugen said in written testimony submitted ahead of the hearing. “A critical starting point for effective regulation is transparency: full access to data for research not directed by Facebook.”
Senator Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat of Minnesota, said she would ask how algorithms promote harmful and divisive content and if Facebook’s security efforts fell far too short during the capitol riots.
“As chair of the rules committee, I am also particularly interested in hearing from her about whether she thinks Facebook did enough to warn law enforcement and the public about January 6th and whether Facebook removed election misinformation safeguards because it was costing the company financially.”
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Part of what I’m finding so valuable in Ms. Haugen’s testimony is how easily she seems to be swatting down many of Facebook’s standard defenses. One particular reference to Facebook claiming it can’t find underage kids on the platform because they lie about their age when they sign up was easily knocked down; Ms. Haugen said the company can do its standard analyses that it carries out on other types of audiences on the platform. It just chooses not to do so. It is rare to see this kind of inside knowledge of Facebook.
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In response to a question from Mr. Blumenthal about whether Mark Zuckerberg is responsible for Facebook’s algorithms, Ms. Haugen made a subtle point about Facebook’s famously data-driven culture, saying that while Mr. Zuckerberg is ultimately in control, the company often relies on testing and data about what users prefer to guide its decisions. At Facebook, she said, “the metrics make the decision.”
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One thing Ms. Haugen keeps noting is how she still believes in Facebook as a platform, and that it can still be used as a force for good. I don’t really hear that very often from people outside of the company. It’s usually a “burn it all down” approach to social media and decrying it is a net negative for the world. For what it’s worth, folks inside of Facebook have long maintained that it does more good than it does ill in the world. (No empirical data to that effect that I’ve seen, though.)
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Ms. Haugen explained why she leaked the documents. They proved that Facebook “has repeatedly misled the public” about the safety of children, the accuracy of artificial intelligence systems, and Facebook’s spread of divisive and extreme messages. “I came forward because I believe that every human being deserves the dignity of the truth,” she said.
Ms. Haugen’s experience and her work in Silicon Valley are what distinguishes her as a witness today. As she said in her opening testimony, “Almost no one outside of Facebook knows what is happening inside.” Ms. Haugen has come as an insider and brought thousands of internal documents to bolster her case.
Annie Zhu got an Instagram account during her freshman year of high school. At first, she curated her profile carefully, showing off different outfits and looks. She followed body positivity and body neutrality accounts. But she still sometimes compared herself with others, and “it can make me feel bad,” she said.
So when she recently listened to a podcast revealing how Facebook’s research concluded that Instagram, which it owns, was toxic for teenage girls, she said, the findings “didn’t surprise me at all.”
“In my past experiences, it has been a huge struggle,” Ms. Zhu, an 18-year-old Stanford University freshman, said in an interview.
Among young people, the idea that Instagram can hurt someone’s self-image is widely discussed. Ms. Zhu said she and her friends talked about how social interactions on Instagram felt inauthentic. Some friends have deleted the app because they didn’t think it was contributing positively to their lives, she added. She said she now used Instagram largely as a messaging system and rarely posted on it.
“If you ask a young person, it’s something you deal with on a daily basis,” said Vicki Harrison, who directs the Center for Youth Mental Health and Wellbeing at Stanford. “You don’t need this research to tell you this.”
Ms. Harrison works with the GoodforMEdia project, a peer mentoring initiative for older teenagers and young adults to share experiences and advice on using social media. Teenagers she works with have told her that Instagram is often the hardest platform for them because of how polished users’ social media profiles are.
Their experiences were echoed in Facebook’s internal research. Documents that a whistle-blower, Frances Haugen, provided to The Wall Street Journal showed that Instagram made body-image issues worse for one in three teenage girls.
Facebook has responded that the research did not show a causal link and that a majority of teenage girls experiencing body-image issues reported that Instagram either made their body image better or had no impact.
Iris Tsouris, a freshman at Yale University, said Instagram had worsened her body image issues. While she follows some body positivity accounts, that kind of content doesn’t show up in the algorithm-curated posts on her Instagram Explore page — where she instead sees posts about replacing meals with iced coffee.
Facebook’s research was “not at all” eye-opening to her, she said.
“It perpetuates negative self-image in people, stuff that might feed into eating disorders,” Ms. Tsouris, 18, said. “I’ve definitely seen people impacted by jealousy or the fear of missing out.”
Still, some teenagers said they were glad the research was out, even if they were not sure what it would change.
“The fact that Facebook knows is important,” said Claire Turney, 18, a freshman at the University of Virginia who attended high school with Ms. Tsouris. “That they know that it is destructive and they continue to market it to teenage girls is a little messy in my opinion, but that’s capitalism.”
The Senate Commerce committee has been preparing for this hearing for weeks, with the two top members huddling with their aides and Facebook policy experts to prepare their lines of questioning.
Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat of Connecticut who chairs the Senate commerce subcommittee on consumer protections, said in a tweet that he had been speaking with the whistle-blower testifying on Tuesday, Frances Haugen, in the lead-up to the hearing.
“From her first visit with my office, I’ve admired her backbone & bravery in revealing terrible truths about one of the world’s most powerful, implacable corporate giants,” Mr. Blumenthal wrote. “Facebook’s actions make clear that we cannot trust it to police itself. We must consider stronger oversight, effective protections for children, & tools for parents, among the needed reforms.”
Senator Marsha Blackburn, the top Republican on the committee, said that she has been combing over the documents provided by Ms. Haugen.
In her prepared remarks ahead of the hearing, Senator Blackburn said that Facebook was “running scared.”
“They know that — in their words — ‘young adults are less active and less engaged on Facebook’ and that they are running out of teens to add to Instagram,” she said, adding that Congress’ role was to provide oversight to Facebook. “By shining a light on Mr. Zuckerberg and company’s conduct, we will help hold them accountable.”
Last week, the same committee held a hearing with Antigone Davis, Facebook’s global head of safety, in which they accused the company of using the “big tobacco” playbook by hiding research that suggested that their products introduced hate speech, misinformation and other harms through its platform.
The committee also includes Senator Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat of Minnesota, who recently proposed legislation that would hold Facebook accountable for Covid-19 misinformation, and Senator Edward Markey, a Democrat of Massachusetts, who last week reintroduced legislation to provide more protection to young people online.
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Senator Roger Wicker, the Republican from Mississippi, said “the children of America are hooked” on Facebook’s apps. It’s a popular talking point, but it’s interesting to contrast the image of an irresistible, addictive Facebook with the internal research Ms. Haugen provided, which showed that teens were abandoning Facebook (and, to a lesser extent, Instagram) at a rate that alarmed the company’s executives.
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Frances Haugen has started testifying. She says that Facebook will continue to put its “astronomical profits before people,” and that congressional intervention is needed. No mincing of words there.
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We’re already seeing some echoes of certain phrases as the hearing goes on. I imagine “Facebook is prioritizing profit over people” is going to stick, something that Ms. Haugen has repeated in interviews over the last 48 hours. Maybe Facebook will come up with a pithy slogan to defend itself?
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Senator Marsha Blackburn, the ranking Republican member of the subcommittee, said of Facebook’s research: “They know they are guilty.”
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Inside the hearing room, Ms. Haugen nodded vociferously as Mr. Blumenthal called for the S.E.C. and the F.T.C. to investigate Facebook based on her research. She was joined by two lawyers from Whistleblower Aid and will soon make her opening remarks.
Hours before “60 Minutes” broadcast an interview on Sunday with a whistle-blower who has roiled Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s chief executive, posted a video online.
The 38-second clip featured him and his wife, Dr. Priscilla Chan, sailing. The footage, which was taken with new Facebook glasses that can record video, made no reference to the weekslong scandal that has engulfed the company after the whistle-blower leaked documents showing that the social network had studied and understood the harmful effects of its products.
Since The Wall Street Journal started publishing articles based on that leaked information last month, Mr. Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, have said nothing publicly about the revelations. Instead, Facebook’s responses have featured Nick Clegg, the vice president of global affairs, and Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, among others.
That has led lawmakers and others to question: Where are Facebook’s top two leaders?
Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg are deliberately avoiding public comment on the leaked documents, people with knowledge of the matter previously told The New York Times. That way, the executives can avoid negative press and appear to be above the fray, they said.
For months, Facebook has had an internal plan to separate Mr. Zuckerberg from the company’s crises. Instead, his public communications and posts have been focused on product announcements and his plans for the “metaverse,” where people maintain some sense of continuity through all the different digital worlds they inhabit.
Ms. Sandberg, too, has focused on other topics in her public communications. She recently added a post about small businesses in the United Arab Emirates to her Facebook page.
Mr. Zuckerberg deviated from that strategy only recently when he used his Facebook page last month to dispute a New York Times article’s description of a video he had posted. The Times said he was riding an electric surfboard; Mr. Zuckerberg said he instead was riding “a hydrofoil that I’m pumping with my own legs.”
On Monday, Mr. Zuckerberg also posted about a worldwide outage of the social network and its apps, which lasted more than five hours. “Sorry for the disruption today — I know how much you rely on our services to stay connected with the people you care about,” he wrote.
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Senator Blumenthal just made what I imagine will be the first of many comparisons between Facebook and the tobacco industry, saying that Ms. Haugen’s revelations had created a “Big Tobacco moment” for the social network. (Tobacco is a topic Mr. Blumenthal knows well. He made his name suing tobacco companies as the attorney general of Connecticut during the 1990s.)
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Senator Blumenthal called out Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, for his lack of response to Ms. Haugen’s findings. Over the weekend, Mr. Zuckerberg posted video of himself and his wife sailing. The Senator demanded that Mr. Zuckerberg appear before the Senate.
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Last week, Ms. Davis, Facebook’s global head of safety, told this same subcommittee that Facebook’s research about teens obtained by Ms. Haugen was “not a bombshell.” Senator Blumenthal responds directly to that calling it “the very definition of a bombshell.”
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And it begins! Senator Richard Blumenthal kicks off the hearing with a preamble thanking Ms. Haugen.
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Facebook is steeling itself for a long morning of testimony. To get ahead of negative press, top executives have started appearing on some of the network morning shows to burnish the company’s image. Antigone Davis, Facebook’s global head of safety, defended Facebook on Stephanie Ruhle’s MSNBC show moments ago.
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Just 48 hours after Ms. Haugen first revealed herself, she has garnered something of a Twitter presence. With just over 25,000 followers, her latest tweet directs people to watch her testimony on Capitol Hill this morning. She has also started following a handful of people — mostly social media academics and politicians.
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Frances Haugen’s in-person appearance contrasts with Facebook’s Antigone Davis, the company executive who streamed in via a link to a Facebook conference room in Washington D.C. during her testimony last week.
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Witness Frances Haugen arrived with a small group of attorneys. The lines aren’t as long as other Facebook hearings, which are full of rows of Facebook lobbyists.
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Ms. Haugen is being represented by Whistleblower Aid, a legal nonprofit, whose founder John Tye was approached by the former Facebook product manager this spring. Mr. Tye told the Times that he understood the significance of what Ms. Haugen had access to “within a few minutes” of speaking to her, and began calling her by the alias “Sean” as they sought to put together a whistle-blower complaint for the Securities and Exchange Commission. Whistleblower Aid, which represented the Trump administration’s Ukraine whistle-blower, and Ms. Haugen chose to file with the S.E.C. because of its strong protections for corporate tipsters, Mr. Tye said.
Frances Haugen, a former Facebook product manager, will appear before a Senate hearing on Tuesday to push for more regulation of Facebook. Below is an excerpt from the opening statement of her written testimony.
My name is Frances Haugen. I used to work at Facebook and joined because I think Facebook has the potential to bring out the best in us. But I am here today because I believe that Facebook’s products harm children, stoke division, weaken our democracy and much more. The company’s leadership knows ways to make Facebook and Instagram safer and won’t make the necessary changes because they have put their immense profits before people. Congressional action is needed. They cannot solve this crisis without your help. I believe that social media has the potential to enrich our lives and our society. We can have social media we enjoy — one that brings out the best in humanity. The internet has enabled people around the world to receive and share information and ideas in ways never conceived of before. And while the internet has the power to connect an increasingly globalized society, without careful and responsible development, the internet can harm as much as it helps.
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Here’s what I’m looking for: fresh new ideas on regulation. The whistleblower Frances Haugen is calling for regulation of the technology and business model that amplifies hate and she’s not shy about comparing Facebook to tobacco. Will lawmakers agree?
Tuesday’s hearing was scheduled after the numerous articles in The Wall Street Journal showed efforts at the company to push more user engagement, potentially amplifying misinformation and hate speech, including during the Capitol riots of January 6.
Frances Haugen, a former Facebook product manager, didn’t just take those documents to the Journal. Late this summer, she began to meet with members of Congress, including Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat from Connecticut, and Senator Marsha Blackburn, a Republican from Tennessee.
Months before the whistle-blower contacted their offices, the two lawmakers had been focused on children’s safety online and had held a hearing in May about screen time and how companies like Facebook and TikTok were designing their products to keep children online.
On Aug. 4, the lawmakers wrote a letter to Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, asking for any internal research on the social emotional well-being of children on Instagram. Facebook responded with a letter that played up its apps’ positive effects on children and deflected questions about internal research.
After that letter, Ms. Haugen and her lawyers contacted the lawmakers and shared many documents. With the new information provided by Ms. Haugen and after the Wall Street Journal’s series, the lawmakers announced two hearings focused on Facebook’s negative impact on children.
Last week, the lawmakers held a hearing with Facebook’s global head of safety, Antigone Davis, who was grilled on how its services hurt young people. The company had already announced, after the Wall Street Journal’s story, that it would suspend plans for a version of Instagram for elementary-aged children.
“It is clear that Facebook prioritizes profit over the well-being of our children,” Ms. Blackburn said in a statement. “We need to know the truth about how Facebook approaches several issues key to the online activities of kids and teens.”
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This hearing is about Instagram and children, but lawmakers could ask the Facebook whistleblower about much more. Jan. 6th, genocide in Myanmar, hate groups, and what Mark Zuckerberg knew and when, will all be on the table.
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The whistleblower, in her first live public appearance, will be a show-stopper. But beyond talk, what will be the path forward with legislation? How do you regulate a company at Facebook’s scale without impeding free expression or focusing on the wrong things?
Just who is Frances Haugen?
For weeks, the onetime Facebook product manager made waves while behind the scenes. After amassing thousands of pages of Facebook documents while working at the company, she had shared the trove with The Wall Street Journal, lawmakers and regulators, leading to revelations that the social network knew about many of the harms it was causing.
Ms. Haugen only revealed herself on Sunday night. That was when she went on “60 Minutes,” started tweeting, published a personal website, started a GoFundMe and announced a European tour to speak with lawmakers and regulators. The move was timed ahead of a congressional hearing on Tuesday, when Ms. Haugen is set to testify in person on Facebook’s impact on young people.
Details about Ms. Haugen, 37, have since spilled out. A native of Iowa City, Iowa, she studied electrical and computer engineering at Olin College and got an M.B.A. from Harvard. She then worked at various Silicon Valley companies, including Google, Pinterest and Yelp.
In June 2019, she joined Facebook. There, she handled democracy and misinformation issues, as well as working on counterespionage as part of the civic misinformation team, according to her personal website.
She left Facebook in May, but not before exfiltrating thousands of pages of internal research and documents. Those documents have formed the basis of a series of Journal articles and a whistle-blower complaint that she and her lawyers have filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Despite her seemingly adversarial position, Ms. Haugen has said she doesn’t hate Facebook and just wants to improve it.
“We can have social media that brings out the best in humanity,” she said on her website.
While she shared some of the company documents with members of Congress and the offices of at least five attorneys general, Ms. Haugen decided not to provide them to the Federal Trade Commission, which has filed an antitrust suit against Facebook. She has said she does not believe that antitrust enforcement is the way to solve the company’s problems.
“The path forward is about transparency and governance,” she said in a video on her GoFundMe page. “It’s not about breaking up Facebook.”
In prepared remarks for the hearing on Tuesday, which were released ahead of time, Ms. Haugen also likened Facebook to tobacco companies and automakers before the government stepped in with regulations for cigarettes and seatbelt laws.
“Congress can change the rules Facebook plays by and stop the harm it is causing,” she said.
A Facebook whistle-blower is taking her campaign to Washington.
Frances Haugen, a former product manager at Facebook who leaked internal documents to The Wall Street Journal that have generated numerous revelations about the company, will testify in a Senate hearing on Tuesday morning.
The hearing, which starts at 10 a.m., is part of Ms. Haugen’s tour aimed at bringing more government oversight to the social media giant. She appeared on “60 Minutes” on Sunday night and is expected to meet with European regulators this month. Ms. Haugen has warned that Facebook does not have the incentive to change its core goal of increasing engagement — even with harmful content — without intervention from regulators.
Here is what to expect at the hearing:
Ms. Haugen will focus on the company’s push to obtain younger and younger users. Some of the research she leaked to The Journal showed that Instagram harmed teenagers by feeding on anxiety and, in some cases, suicidal ideations. The research revealed that one in three teens reported feeling worse about their body image because of Instagram.
“I am here today because I believe that Facebook’s products harm children, stoke division, weaken our democracy and much more,” Ms. Haugen said in written testimony. “The company’s leadership knows ways to make Facebook and Instagram safer and won’t make the necessary changes because they have put their immense profits before people. Congressional action is needed.”
Lawmakers will embrace Ms. Haugen’s testimony. Concerns about the safety of children online have united Republicans and Democrats. They have grown increasingly angry at Facebook for failing to protect young users and for allowing misinformation to spread.
Lawmakers will drill into what knowledge Facebook’s executives had on Instagram’s toxic effect on young users. They will probably ask if Mark Zuckerberg and other leaders were aware of but ignored the research on Instagram’s effect on children and other issues like the spread of hate groups ahead of the Capitol riots.
Lawmakers will probably also ask Ms. Haugen how the company’s systems work to promote toxic content. They will also focus on how tools like beauty filters, comments and Facebook’s “like” button can hook young users to Instagram.
Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat of Connecticut and the chair of the panel on consumer protection, product safety and data security will highlight an experiment his office ran, in which it created an account for a fake 13-year-old user who expressed interest in weight loss. The account was nudged into a rabbit hole of content promoting eating disorders and other self-harms, he said in an interview.
“I want to talk about her perceptions about what she read in those documents and the use of algorithms to increase profits but also to exacerbate the harms,” Mr. Blumenthal said.
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