Whistleblower Reveals Facebook Turning Off Content Safeguards For Profit Likely Contributed To Capitol Invasion

The algorithm change got people to keep coming back to the website, which further helped the company sell more of the digital ads that generate most of its advertising.

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New Delhi: A former Facebook employee, Frances Haugen claimed that Facebook prematurely turned off safeguards designed to prevent misinformation after Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in last year’s elections to make money.

She further alleged that this may have contributed to the invasion of the U.S. Capitol on January 6. 

During an interview that aired Sunday on CBS’ “60 Minutes” the whistleblower, who worked as a product manager stated that in 2018, the content flow to the website was changed in Facebook's newsfeed which contributed to more divisiveness and ill will in a network ostensibly created to bring people closer together.

This change got people to keep coming back to the website, which further helped the company sell more of the digital ads that generate most of its advertising.

“The thing I saw at Facebook over and over again was there were conflicts of interest between what was good for the public and what was good for Facebook,” said Haugen, who joined Facebook in 2019 after working at Google and Pinterest.

The change became more visible, Facebook’s annual revenue has more than doubled from $56 billion in 2018 to a projected $119 billion this year, based on the estimates of analysts surveyed by FactSet. Meanwhile, the company’s market value has soared from $375 billion at the end of 2018 to nearly $1 trillion now.

After the interview came out, Facebook's top executive asserts that Haugen's allegations are “misleading”, AP reported. 

“Social media has had a big impact on society in recent years, and Facebook is often a place where much of this debate plays out,” Nick Clegg, the company’s vice president of policy and public affairs wrote to Facebook employees in a memo sent on Friday according to the report. 

This interview came at a time when lawmakers and regulators continue to scrutinise Facebook's power to shape opinions and its polarizing effects. 

The backlash towards the social networking platform has only increased in recent time, in a mid-September, Wall Street Journal expose, revealed Facebook’s own internal research had concluded the social network’s attention-seeking algorithms had helped foster political dissent and contributed to mental health and emotional problems among teens, especially girls.

Haugen had leaked thousands of pages of internal research to the Journal which provided as the foundation for a succession of stories packaged as the “Facebook Files”.

According to Sunday's '60 Minutes' interview, the 37-year-old former employee has also filed 8 complaints with US securities stating that Facebook has been withholding information regarding the risks the social media platforms has.