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    When dead children are just the price of doing business, Zuckerberg’s apology is empty | Carole Cadwalladr

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    I don’t generally approve of blood sports but I’m happy to make an exception for the hunting and baiting of Silicon Valley executives in a congressional committee room. But then I like expensive, pointless spectacles. And waterboarding tech CEOs in Congress is right up there with firework displays, a brief, thrillingly meaningless sensation on the retina and then darkness.Last week’s grilling of Mark Zuckerberg and his fellow Silicon Valley Übermenschen was a classic of the genre: front pages, headlines, and a genuinely stand-out moment of awkwardness in which he was forced to face victims for the first time ever and apologise: stricken parents holding the photographs of their dead children lost to cyberbullying and sexual exploitation on his platform.Less than six hours later, his company delivered its quarterly results, Meta’s stock price surged by 20.3% delivering a $200bn bump to the company’s market capitalisation and, if you’re counting, which as CEO he presumably does, a $700m sweetener for Zuckerberg himself. Those who listened to the earnings call tell me there was no mention of dead children.A day later, Biden announced, “If you harm an American, we will respond”, and dropped missiles on more than 80 targets across Syria and Iraq. Sure bro, just so long as the Americans aren’t teenagers with smart phones. US tech companies routinely harm Americans, and in particular, American children, though to be fair they routinely harm all other nationalities’ children too: the Wall Street Journal has shown Meta’s algorithms enable paedophiles to find each other. New Mexico’s attorney general is suing the company for being the “largest marketplace for predators and paedophiles globally”. A coroner in Britain found that 14-year-old Molly Jane Russell, “died from an act of self-harm while suffering from depression and the negative effects of online content” – which included Instagram videos depicting suicide.And while dispatching a crack squad of Navy Seals to Menlo Park might be too much to hope for, there are other responses that the US Congress could have mandated, such as, here’s an idea, a law. Any law. One that, say, prohibits tech companies from treating dead children as just a cost of doing business.Because demanding that tech companies don’t enable paedophiles to find and groom children is the lowest of all low-hanging fruit in the tech regulation space. And yet even that hasn’t happened yet. What America urgently needs is to act on its anti-trust laws and break up these companies as a first basic step. It needs to take an axe to Section 230, the law that gives platforms immunity from lawsuits for hosting harmful or illegal content.It needs basic product safety legislation. Imagine GlaxoSmithKline launched an experimental new wonder drug last year. A drug that has shown incredible benefits, including curing some forms of cancer and slowing down ageing. It might also cause brain haemorrhages and abort foetuses, but the data on that is not yet in so we’ll just have to wait and see. There’s a reason that doesn’t happen. They’re called laws. Drug companies go through years of testing. Because they have to. Because at some point, a long time ago, Congress and other legislatures across the world did their job.Yet Silicon Valley’s latest extremely disruptive technology, generative AI, was released into the wild last year without even the most basic federally mandated product testing. Last week, deep fake porn images of the most famous female star on the planet, Taylor Swift, flooded social media platforms, which had no legal obligation to take them down – and hence many of them didn’t.But who cares? It’s only violence being perpetrated against a woman. It’s only non-consensual sexual assault, algorithmically distributed to millions of people across the planet. Punishing women is the first step in the rollout of any disruptive new technology, so get used to that, and if you think deep fakes are going to stop with pop stars, good luck with that too.You thought misinformation during the US election and Brexit vote in 2016 was bad? Well, let’s wait and see what 2024 has to offer. Could there be any possible downside to releasing this untested new technology – one that enables the creation of mass disinformation at scale for no cost – at the exact moment in which more people will go to the polls than at any time in history?You don’t actually have to imagine where that might lead because it’s already happened. A deep fake targeting a progressive candidate dropped days before the Slovakian general election in October. It’s impossible to know what impact it had or who created it, but the candidate lost, and the opposition pro-Putin candidate won. CNN reports that the messaging of the deepfake echoed that put out by Russia’s foreign intelligence service, just an hour before it dropped. And where was Facebook in all of this, you ask? Where it usually is, refusing to take many of the deep fake posts down.Back in Congress, grilling tech execs is something to do to fill the time in between the difficult job of not passing tech legislation. It’s now six years since the Cambridge Analytica scandal when Zuckerberg became the first major tech executive to be commanded to appear before Congress. That was a revelation because it felt like Facebook might finally be brought to heel.But Wednesday’s outing was Zuckerberg’s eighth. And neither Facebook, nor any other tech platform, has been brought to heel. The US has passed not a single federal law. Meanwhile, Facebook has done some exculpatory techwashing of its name to remove the stench of data scandals and Kremlin infiltration and occasionally offers up its CEO for a ritual slaughtering on the Senate floor.To understand America’s end-of-empire waning dominance in the world, its broken legislature and its capture by corporate interests, the symbolism of a senator forcing Zuckerberg to apologise to bereaved parents while Congress – that big white building stormed by insurrectionists who found each other on social media platforms – does absolutely nothing to curb his company’s singular power is as good as any place to start.We’ve had eight years to learn the lessons of 2016 and yet here we are. Britain has responded by weakening the body that protects our elections and degrading our data protection laws to “unlock post-Brexit opportunities”. American congressional committees are now a cargo cult that go through ritualised motions of accountability. Meanwhile, there’s a new tech wonder drug on the market that may create untold economic opportunities or lethal bioweapons and the destabilisation of what is left of liberal democracy. Probably both. Carole Cadwalladr is a reporter and feature writer for the Observer More

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      When Mark Zuckerberg can face US senators and claim the moral high ground, we’re through the looking glass | Marina Hyde

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      Did you catch a clip of the tech CEOs in Washington this week? The Senate judiciary committee had summoned five CEOs to a hearing titled Big Tech and the Online Child Sexual Exploitation Crisis. There was Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, TikTok’s Shou Zi Chew, Snapchat’s Evan Spiegel, Discord’s Jason Citron and X’s Linda Yaccarino – and a predictable vibe of “Senator, I’m a parent myself …” Listen, these moguls simply want to provide the tools to help families and friends connect with each other. Why must human misery and untold, tax-avoidant billions attend them at every turn?If you did see footage from the hearing, it was probably one of two moments of deliberately clippable news content. Ranking committee member Lindsey Graham addressed Zuckerberg with the words: “I know you don’t mean it to be so, but you have blood on your hands.” Well, ditto, Senator. “You have a product that is killing people,” continued Graham, who strangely has yet to make the same point to the makers of whichever brand of AR-15 he proudly owns, or indeed to the makers of the assault rifles responsible for another record high of US school shootings last year. Firearms fatalities are the number one cause of death among US children and teenagers, a fact the tech CEOs at this hearing politely declined to mention, because no one likes a whatabouterist. And after all, the point of these things is to just get through the posturing of politicians infinitely less powerful than you, then scoot back to behaving precisely as you were before. Zuckerberg was out of there in time to report bumper results and announce Meta’s first ever dividend on Thursday. At time of writing, its shares were soaring.Anyhow, if it wasn’t that clip, maybe it was the one of Zuckerberg being goaded by sedition fist-pumper Josh Hawley into apologising to those in the committee room audience who had lost children to suicide following exploitation on his platform. Thanks to some stagey prodding by Senator Hawley, who famously encouraged the mob on 6 January 2020 (before later being filmed running away from them after they stormed the Capitol), Zuckerberg turned round, stood up, and faced his audience of the bereaved. “I’m sorry for everything you’ve all gone through,” he began. Helpfully, a transcribed version of this off-the-cuff moment found its way into a Meta press release minutes after the event.View image in fullscreenSo I guess that was the hearing. “Tense”, “heated”, “stunning” – listen, if adjectival cliches were legislation, this exercise would have been something more than pointless. And yet, they’re not and it wasn’t. There really ought to be a genre name for this kind of performative busywork – the theatre of failure, perhaps.Other outcomes were once available. Back in 1994, the CEOs of seven big tobacco firms took their oaths before a Senate committee, then spouted a communal line that nicotine wasn’t addictive. Within two years, all seven had quit the tobacco industry – a development not unrelated to the fact that all seven were under investigation by the justice department for perjury. Those were different times, and not just because we probably wouldn’t slap them with the “seven dwarfs” moniker now. These days, you can’t escape the sense that old guys were shouting at Zuckerberg at a hearing six years ago, while he offered 2018’s variation on his favourite blandishment: “We know we have more work to do”. And you suspect they’ll be shouting at him again in five years’ time, when he will still know they have more work to do. “If you’re waiting on these guys to solve the problem,” sniffed Graham of the tech CEOs, “we’re gonna die waiting.” Again, the senator speaks of what he knows. There is always talk of legislation, but there is never really much legislation.There’s a line near the start of the movie version of Ready Player One, the cult dystopian book about a VR world that weirdly feels like the lodestar for Zuckerberg’s pivot towards the metaverse: “I was born in 2027,” explains the teenage protagonist, “after the corn syrup droughts, after the bandwidth riots … after people stopped trying to fix problems, and just tried to outlive them.” It was hard to watch any amount of Wednesday’s hearing – it’s hard to watch a lot of news about the intersection of politics and mega-business these days, in fact – and not feel we are in a very similar place. Few of the politicians giving it the hero act could be said to have left the world in a better place than the one in which they found it when they took office. A necrotic form of politics has gripped the Republican party in particular, and this is the vacuum in which they have been downgraded by corporations they don’t even understand, let alone have the will, foresight, or political skill to control.“Companies over countries,” as Mark Zuckerberg said a long time ago. This once-unformed thought becomes more realised all the time, with the Meta boss last year explaining that, “Increasingly, the real world is a combination of the physical world we inhabit and the digital world we are building.” The added irony is that the more the Lindsey Grahams fail the real world, the more people retreat further into the unregulated embrace of the worlds that the Mark Zuckerbergs run. It’s going to take so much more than the theatre of failure to solve it – but bad actors currently dominate the bill.
      Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist More

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      Mark Zuckerberg apologises directly to families of online harm victims in Senate hearing – video

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      Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, spoke directly to victims and their family members as he testified during the US Senate judiciary committee hearing on Wednesday.
      After an intense line of questioning by the Republican senator Josh Hawley, who asked Zuckerberg if he would like to apologise to families of victims who were sitting in the audience holding photos of children they say died or were harmed due to his platform, Zuckerberg stood up and faced them More

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      Brawny billionaires, pumped-up politicians: why powerful men are challenging each other to fights

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      The first rule of insecure masculinity fight club? Tell everyone about it. And I mean everyone. Tweet about it, talk to reporters, shout about it from the rooftops. Make sure the entire world knows that you are a big boy who could beat just about anyone in a fistfight.Twenty twenty-three, as I’m sure you will have observed, was the year that tech CEOs stepped away from their screens and decided to get physical. Elon Musk, perennially thirsty for attention, was at the center of this embarrassing development. The 52-year-old – who challenged Vladimir Putin to single combat in 2022 – spent much of the year teasing the idea that he was going head-to-head with Mark Zuckerberg in a cage fight. At one point he suggested the fight would be held at the Colosseum in Rome.Don’t worry, you didn’t miss it. The fight never happened and will never ever happen for the simple reason that Musk would get destroyed by Zuckerberg, who has been obsessively training in mixed martial arts (MMA) and won a bunch of medals in a Brazilian jiujitsu tournament. The only way Musk will actually follow through with the cage match is if he manages to get his hands on some kind of brain-implant technology that magically transforms him into a lean, mean, fighting machine. Indeed, I wouldn’t be surprised if Neuralink, Musk’s brain-chip startup, was working on that brief right now. Although seeing as the company is under federal investigation after killing 1,500 animals in testing– many of which died extremely grisly deaths – it may be a while before any such technology comes to fruition.Musk and Zuck aren’t the only tech execs looking to get physical. Vin Diesel-level biceps have become the latest billionaire status symbol. Just look at Jeff Bezos: his muscles have increased at about the same rate as his bank account. The Airbnb CEO, Brian Chesky, has also been working on getting swole. Back in June, Chesky told the Bloomberg writer Dave Lee that he’d “challenge any leader in tech to bench press”. He added: “I’ve been waiting for these physical battles in tech. It’s just so funny.”It’s not just tech bros. Politicians are at it too. Over the summer, Robert F Kennedy Jr posted a video of himself doing push-ups while shirtless with the caption “Getting in shape for my debates with President Biden!” Which may or may not have been prompted by Biden once challenging an Iowa voter and Donald Trump to a push-up contest.I don’t know how good Kevin McCarthy is at push-ups, but he’s certainly fond of shoving. In November, the former speaker bumped into the congressman Tim Burchett of Tennessee and reportedly elbowed him in the back. Burchett then chased after him, calling him a “jerk” and a “chicken”. McCarthy, it seems, was angry that Burchett had helped oust him from the speakership in October, making him the first speaker in US history to have been removed by his own side.Just a few hours after that altercation, Markwayne Mullin, a Republican senator from Oklahoma, challenged Sean O’Brien, president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, to a physical confrontation during a Senate committee hearing on labor unions. Mullin, a former businessman who regularly boasts about his prowess as an MMA fighter, was miffed that O’Brien had once called him a “greedy CEO” and a “clown” on Twitter. He decided to settle his private grievance during a public hearing and the two agreed to have a fight right there and then – yelling at each other to “stand your butt up” and get started. Eventually Bernie Sanders got them to calm down.Just pause for a moment and imagine acting like this in your own job. I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty sure that if I challenged a colleague to a fight and started yelling at them to “sit their butt down” in the middle of a public meeting, I would face some sort of consequences. In the Mullins case, the meltdown doesn’t seem to have had any impact on his career. It may have even increased his popularity among his base. Politicians routinely seem to be held to a lower standard than the rest of us.If you ignore the fact that we’re being ruled by people with enormous egos and no self-restraint, then there is an amusing element to all this. But more than anything, it’s just pathetic, isn’t it? All these grown men so clearly worried about their masculinity that they feel the need to puff out their chests and show everyone just how strong they are.The one per cent’s desperate shows of bravado are part of a broader insecurity about masculinity in the west that plenty of snake-oil salesmen and opportunists are exploiting for all it’s worth. In 2022, for example, the rightwing commentator Tucker Carlson came out with a documentary called The End of Men that argues testosterone counts are plummeting and “real men” are an endangered species. The documentary was full of bizarre ways to counteract this, including testicle tanning. I’m not sure how many tech bros and politicians are regularly exposing their balls to red-light therapy, but there does seem to be a widespread preoccupation with “bromeopathic” ways to increase testosterone. Testosterone blood-test “T parties” are apparently a growing trend among tech types: a bunch of founders get together and find ways to raise their T.Do whatever you like in private, I say. Tan your testicles, go to T parties, organize push-up competitions. Just don’t foist your masculine insecurities on the rest of us. Stop challenging each other to public fights and getting into brawls in government. It seems to be easy enough for women to follow this advice, doesn’t it? I mean … has a female CEO or politician ever tried to organize a public fistfight with a female counterpart? I’ve got a weird feeling the answer is “no, they would be a complete laughingstock if they did”, but if anyone can find me a recent example then I’ll eat my hat. Or – on second thoughts – I’ll throw my hat in the ring and fight Elon Musk myself in the Roman Colosseum. Consider that a challenge. More

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      Republicans shelve Zuckerberg contempt vote in ‘censorship’ inquiry ‘for now’

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      Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, is no stranger to Capitol Hill, where he has sparred with Republicans and Democrats over how he runs his platforms. A Republican-led panel was set to vote on Thursday on a resolution to hold him in contempt of Congress, for allegedly failing to turn over internal documents on content moderation.However, House judiciary committee chair Jim Jordan, a Republican of Ohio, temporarily suspended the vote.Jordan announced on Twitter that the committee “decided to hold contempt in abeyance. For now” and posted a series of tweets of alleged internal communications among Meta executives hours ahead of the hearing.“To be clear, contempt is still on the table and WILL be used if Facebook fails to cooperate in FULL,” Jordan said.Republican lawmakers have repeatedly accused Meta – along with other big names Google, Apple and Microsoft – of suppressing conservative speech on their platforms.Jim Jordan had alleged that Meta failed to turn over requested internal company documents to an investigation into tech companies and “willfully refused to comply in full with a congressional subpoena”, according to a report released on Tuesday.Jordan, an Ohio Republican, also subpoenaed the chief executives at Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon and Apple in February. Zuckerberg is so far the only one facing additional scrutiny.But regulating tech companies is a rare area of bipartisan support, even if the reasons behind it are different. Meta has come under fire from Democrats over privacy concerns and its marketing toward kids and teens. In 2020, Zuckerberg, along with the then Twitter chief executive, Jack Dorsey, faced intense questioning during a Senate judiciary hearing where Democrats condemned the executives for amplifying misinformation, such as false claims of election fraud, and raised antitrust concerns.Meta says it has fully complied with the congressional investigation.“For many months, Meta has operated in good faith with this committee’s sweeping requests for information. We began sharing documents before the committee’s February subpoena and have continued to do so,” said a Meta spokesperson, Andy Stone, in a statement posted in response to the hearing notice on Tuesday.He said Meta had so far delivered more than 53,000 pages of internal and external documents and “made nearly a dozen current and former employees available to discuss external and internal matters, including some scheduled this very week”, according to the statement.Politico reported that Meta handed over more documents hours before Jordan announced the Thursday vote but that the Ohio Republican was not satisfied.“They’ve given us documents because we’re pushing and because we’re talking about this – we appreciate that, but we are convinced that it’s way short of what they should be providing us,” Jordan reportedly said in an interview.One social media company, Twitter – which now goes by X – has escaped much of the scrutiny as its chief executive, Elon Musk, has been seen as friendly to conservatives. In his February letter to tech companies, Jordan called Twitter a model of transparency and praised its “Twitter files” – which many experts flagged as sensationalized.Meta’s second-quarter revenue defied expectations after its earnings release on Wednesday, and Zuckerberg’s own net worth surged on Thursday. More

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      Nick Clegg to decide on Trump’s 2023 return to Instagram and Facebook

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      Nick Clegg to decide on Trump’s 2023 return to Instagram and FacebookMeta’s president of global affairs said it would be a decision ‘I oversee’ after the ex-president’s accounts were suspended in 2021 Nick Clegg, Meta’s president of global affairs, is charged with deciding whether Donald Trump will be allowed to return to Facebook and Instagram in 2023, Clegg said on Thursday.Speaking at an event held in Washington by news organization Semafor, Clegg said the company was seriously debating whether Trump’s accounts should be reinstated and said it was a decision that “I oversee and I drive”.Judge asks Trump’s team for proof that FBI planted documents at Mar-a-Lago Read moreClegg added that while he will be making the final call, he will consult the CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook board of directors and outside experts.“It’s not a capricious decision,” he said. “We will look at the signals related to real-world harm to make a decision whether at the two-year point – which is early January next year – whether Trump gets reinstated to the platform.”The former president was suspended from a number of online platforms, including those owned by Meta, following the 6 January 2021 Capitol riot during which Trump used his social media accounts to praise and perpetuate the violence.While Twitter banned Trump permanently, Meta suspended Trump’s accounts for two years, to be later re-evaluated. In May 2021, a temporary ban was upheld by Facebook’s oversight board – a group of appointed academics and former politicians meant to operate independently of Facebook’s corporate leadership.However, the board returned the final decision on Trump’s accounts to Meta, suggesting the company decide in six months whether to make the ban permanent. Clegg said that decision will be made by 7 January 2023.Clegg previously served as Britain’s deputy prime minister and joined Facebook as vice‑president for global affairs and communications in 2018. In February, he was promoted to the top company policy executive role.In the years since he began at Meta, Clegg has seen the company through a number of scandals, including scrutiny of its policies during the 2016 US presidential election, Facebook’s role in the persecution of the Rohingya in Myanmar, and the revelations made by whistleblower Frances Haugen.TopicsDonald TrumpNick CleggMark ZuckerbergFacebookInstagramUS Capitol attackUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Facebook’s very bad year. No, really, it might be the worst yet

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      Facebook’s very bad year. No, really, it might be the worst yet From repeated accusations of fostering misinformation to multiple whistleblowers, the company weathered some battles in 2021It’s a now-perennial headline: Facebook has had a very bad year.Years of mounting pressure from Congress and the public culminated in repeated PR crises, blockbuster whistleblower revelations and pending regulation over the past 12 months.And while the company’s bottom line has not yet wavered, 2022 is not looking to be any better than 2021 – with more potential privacy and antitrust actions on the horizon.Here are some of the major battles Facebook has weathered in the past year.Capitol riots launch a deluge of scandalsFacebook’s year started with allegations that a deadly insurrection on the US Capitol was largely planned on its platform. Regulatory uproar over the incident reverberated for months, leading lawmakers to call CEO Mark Zuckerberg before Congress to answer for his platform’s role in the attack.In the aftermath, Zuckerberg defended his decision not to take action against Donald Trump, though the former president stoked anger and separatist flames on his personal and campaign accounts. Facebook’s inaction led to a rare public employee walkout and Zuckerberg later reversed the hands-off approach to Trump. Barring Trump from Facebook platforms sparked backlash once again – this time from Republican lawmakers alleging censorship.What ensued was a months-long back-and-forth between Facebook and its independent oversight board, with each entity punting the decision of whether to keep Trump off the platform. Ultimately, Facebook decided to extend Trump’s suspension to two years. Critics said this underscored the ineffectiveness of the body. “What is the point of the oversight board?” asked the Real Oversight Board, an activist group monitoring Facebook, after the non-verdict.Whistleblowers take on FacebookThe scandal with perhaps the biggest impact on the company this year came in the form of the employee-turned-whistleblower Frances Haugen, who leaked internal documents that exposed some of the inner workings of Facebook and just how much the company knew about the harmful effects its platform was having on users and society.Haugen’s revelations, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, showed Facebook was aware of many of its grave public health impacts and had the means to mitigate them – but chose not to do so.For instance, documents show that since at least 2019, Facebook has studied the negative impact Instagram had on teenage girls and yet did little to mitigate the harms and publicly denied that was the case. Those findings in particular led Congress to summon company executives to multiple hearings on the platform and teen users.Facebook has since paused its plans to launch an Instagram app for kids and introduced new safety measures encouraging users to take breaks if they use the app for long periods of time. In a Senate hearing on 8 December, the Instagram executive Adam Mosseri called on Congress to launch an independent body tasked with regulating social media more comprehensively, sidestepping calls for Instagram to regulate itself.Haugen also alleged Facebook’s tweaks to its algorithm, which turned off some safeguards intended to fight misinformation, may have led to the Capitol attack. She provided information underscoring how little of its resources it dedicates to moderating non-English language content.In response to the Haugen documents, Congress has promised legislation and drafted a handful of new bills to address Facebook’s power. One controversial measure would target Section 230, a portion of the Communications Decency Act that exempts companies from liability for content posted on their platforms.Haugen was not the only whistleblower to take on Facebook in 2021. In April, the former Facebook data scientist turned whistleblower Sophie Zhang revealed to the Guardian that Facebook repeatedly allowed world leaders and politicians to use its platform to deceive the public or harass opponents. Zhang has since been called to testify on these findings before parliament in the UK and India.Lawmakers around the world are eager to hear from the Facebook whistleblowers. Haugen also testified in the UK regarding the documents she leaked, telling MPs Facebook “prioritizes profit over safety”.Such testimony is likely to influence impending legislation, including the Online Safety Bill: a proposed act in the UK that would task the communications authority Ofcom with regulating content online and requiring tech firms to protect users from harmful posts or face substantial fines.Zuckerberg and Cook feud over Apple updateThough Apple has had its fair share of regulatory battles, Facebook did not find an ally in its fellow tech firm while facing down the onslaught of consumer and regulatory pressure that 2021 brought.The iPhone maker in April launched a new notification system to alert users when and how Facebook was tracking their browsing habits, supposedly as a means to give them more control over their privacy.Facebook objected to the new policy, arguing Apple was doing so to “self-preference their own services and targeted advertising products”. It said the feature would negatively affect small businesses relying on Facebook to advertise. Apple pressed on anyway, rolling it out in April and promising additional changes in 2022.Preliminary reports suggest Apple is, indeed, profiting from the change while Google and Facebook have seen advertising profits fall.Global outage takes out all Facebook productsIn early October, just weeks after Haugen’s revelations, things took a sudden turn for the worse when the company faced a global service outage.Perhaps Facebook’s largest and most sustained tech failure in recent history, the glitch left billions of users unable to access Facebook, Instagram or Whatsapp for six hours on 4 and 5 October.Facebook’s share price dropped 4.9% that day, cutting Zuckerberg’s personal wealth by $6bn, according to Bloomberg.Other threats to FacebookAs Facebook faces continuing calls for accountability, its time as the wunderkind of Silicon Valley has come to a close and it has become a subject of bipartisan contempt.Republicans repeatedly have accused Facebook of being biased against conservatism, while liberals have targeted the platform for its monopolistic tendencies and failure to police misinformation.In July, the Biden administration began to take a harder line with the company over vaccine misinformation – which Joe Biden said was “killing people” and the US surgeon general said was “spreading like wildfire” on the platform. Meanwhile, the appointment of the antitrust thought leader Lina Khan to head of the FTC spelled trouble for Facebook. She has been publicly critical of the company and other tech giants in the past, and in August refiled a failed FTC case accusing Facebook of anti-competitive practices.After a year of struggles, Facebook has thrown something of a Hail Mary: changing its name. The company announced it would now be called Meta, a reference to its new “metaverse” project, which will create a virtual environment where users can spend time.The name change was met with derision and skepticism from critics. But it remains to be seen whether Facebook, by any other name, will beat the reputation that precedes it.TopicsFacebookTim CookMark ZuckerbergUS CongressUS Capitol attackAppleUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Facebook boss ‘not willing to protect public from harm’

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      The ObserverFacebookFacebook boss ‘not willing to protect public from harm’ Frances Haugen says chief executive has not shown any desire to shield users from the consequences of harmful content Dan MilmoSat 23 Oct 2021 21.02 EDTLast modified on Sun 24 Oct 2021 04.23 EDTThe Facebook whistleblower whose revelations have tipped the social media giant into crisis has launched a stinging new criticism of Mark Zuckerberg, saying he has not shown any readiness to protect the public from the harm his company is causing.Frances Haugen told the Observer that Facebook’s founder and chief executive had not displayed a desire to run the company in a way that shields the public from the consequences of harmful content.Her intervention came as pressure mounted on the near-$1tn (£730bn) business following a fresh wave of revelations based on documents leaked by Haugen, a former Facebook employee. The New York Times reported that workers had repeatedly warned that Facebook was being flooded with false claims about the 2020 presidential election result being fraudulent and believed the company should have done more to tackle it.Frances Haugen: ‘I never wanted to be a whistleblower. But lives were in danger’Read moreHaugen, who appears before MPs and peers in Westminster on Monday, said Zuckerberg, who controls the business via a majority of its voting shares, has not shown any willingness to protect the public.“Right now, Mark is unaccountable. He has all the control. He has no oversight, and he has not demonstrated that he is willing to govern the company at the level that is necessary for public safety.”She added that giving all shareholders an equal say in the running of the company would result in changes at the top. “I believe in shareholder rights and the shareholders, or shareholders minus Mark, have been asking for years for one share one vote. And the reason for that is, I am pretty sure the shareholders would choose other leadership if they had an option.”Haugen, who quit as a Facebook product manager in May, said she had leaked tens of thousand of documents to the Wall Street Journal and to Congress because she had realised that the company would not change otherwise.She said: “There are great companies that have done major cultural changes. Apple did a major cultural change; Microsoft did a major cultural change. Facebook can change too. They just have to get the will.”This weekend, a consortium of US news organisations released a fresh wave of stories based on the Haugen documents. The New York Times reported that internal research showed how, at one point after the US presidential election last year, 10% of all US views of political material on Facebook – a very high proportion for Facebook – were of posts falsely alleging that Joe Biden’s victory was fraudulent. One internal review criticised attempts to tackle Stop the Steal groups spreading claims on the platform that the election was rigged. “Enforcement was piecemeal,” said the research.The revelations have reignited concerns about Facebook’s role in the 6 January riots, in which a mob seeking to overturn the election result stormed the Capitol in Washington. The New York Times added that some of the reporting for the story was based on documents not released by Haugen.A Facebook spokesperson said: “At the heart of these stories is a premise which is false. Yes, we’re a business and we make profit, but the idea that we do so at the expense of people’s safety or wellbeing misunderstands where our commercial interests lie. The truth is we’ve invested $13bn and have over 40,000 people to do one job: keep people safe on Facebook.”Facebook’s vice-president of integrity, Guy Rosen, said the company had put in place multiple measures to protect the public during and after the election and that “responsibility for the [6 January] insurrection lies with those who broke the law during the attack and those who incited them”.It was also reported on Friday that a new Facebook whistleblower had come forward and, like Haugen, had filed a complaint to the Securities and Exchange Commission, the US financial regulator, alleging that the company declined to enforce safety rules for fear of angering Donald Trump or impacting Facebook’s growth.Haugen will testify in person on Monday to the joint committee scrutinising the draft online safety bill, which would impose a duty of care on social media companies to protect users from harmful content, and allow the communications regulator, Ofcom, to fine those who breach this. The maximum fine is 10% of global turnover, so in the case of Facebook, this could run into billions of pounds. Facebook, whose services also include Instagram and WhatsApp, has 2.8 billion daily users and generated an income last year of $86bn.As well as issuing detailed rebuttals of Haugen’s revelations, Facebook is reportedly planning a major change that would attempt to put some distance between the company and its main platform. Zuckerberg could announce a rebranding of Facebook’s corporate identity on Thursday, according to a report that said the company is keen to emphasise its future as a player in the “metaverse”, a digital world in which people interact and lead their social and professional lives virtually.Haugen said Facebook must be compelled by all regulators to be more transparent with the information at its disposal internally, as detailed in her document leaks. She said one key reform would be to set up a formal structure whereby regulators could demand reports from Facebook on any problem that they identify.“Let’s imagine there was a brand of car that was having five times as many car accidents as other cars. We wouldn’t accept that car company saying, ‘this is really hard, we are trying our best, we are sorry, we are trying to do better in the future’. We would never accept that as an answer and we are hearing that from Facebook all the time. There needs to be an avenue where we can escalate a concern and they actually have to give us a response.”TopicsFacebookThe ObserverSocial networkingMark ZuckerbergUS elections 2020US CongressUS politicsReuse this content More

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      Facebook harms children and is damaging democracy, claims whistleblower

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      FacebookFacebook harms children and is damaging democracy, claims whistleblowerFrances Haugen says in US Congress testimony that Facebook puts ‘astronomical profits before people’04:21Dan Milmo and Kari PaulTue 5 Oct 2021 14.56 EDTFirst published on Tue 5 Oct 2021 14.48 EDTFacebook puts “astronomical profits before people”, harms children and is destabilising democracies, a whistleblower has claimed in testimony to the US Congress.Frances Haugen said Facebook knew it steered young users towards damaging content and that its Instagram app was “like cigarettes” for under-18s. In a wide-ranging testimony, the former Facebook employee said the company did not have enough staff to keep the platform safe and was “literally fanning” ethnic violence in developing countries.She also told US senators:
      The “buck stops” with the founder and chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg.
      Facebook knows its systems lead teenagers to anorexia-related content.
      The company had to “break the glass” and turn back on safety settings after the 6 January Washington riots.
      Facebook intentionally targets teenagers and children under 13.
      Monday’s outage that brought down Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp meant that for more than five hours Facebook could not “destabilise democracies”.
      Haugen appeared in Washington on Tuesday after coming forward as the source of a series of revelations in the Wall Street Journal last month based on internal Facebook documents. They revealed the company knew Instagram was damaging teenagers’ mental health and that changes to Facebook’s News Feed feature – a central plank of users’ interaction with the service – had made the platform more polarising and divisive.‘Moral bankruptcy’: whistleblower offers scathing assessment of FacebookRead moreHer evidence to senators included the claim that Facebook knew Instagram users were being led to anorexia-related content. She said an algorithm “led children from very innocuous topics like healthy recipes … all the way to anorexia-promoting content over a very short period of time”.In her opening testimony, Haugen, 37, said: “I’m here today because I believe Facebook’s products harm children, stoke division and weaken our democracy. The company’s leadership knows how to make Facebook and Instagram safer, but won’t make the necessary changes because they have put their astronomical profits before people.” She added that Facebook was “buying its profits with our safety”. In 2020, Facebook reported a net income – a US measure of profit – of more than $29bn (£21bn).Referring to Monday’s near six-hour outage in which Facebook’s platforms including Instagram and WhatsApp were disabled for billions of users, Haugen’s testimony added: “For more than five hours Facebook wasn’t used to deepen divides, destabilise democracies and make young girls and women feel bad about their bodies.” Facebook has 3.5 billion monthly active users across its platforms including Instagram and WhatsApp.Warning that Facebook makes choices that “go against the common good”, Haugen said the company should be treated like the tobacco industry, which was subject to government action once it was discovered it was hiding the harms its products caused, or like car companies that were forced to adopt seatbelts or opioid firms that have been sued by government agencies.Urging lawmakers to force more transparency on Facebook, she said there should be more scrutiny of its algorithms, which shape the content delivered to users. “The core of the issue is that no one can understand Facebook’s destructive choices better than Facebook, because only Facebook gets to look under the hood,” she said. With greater transparency, she added, “we can build sensible rules and standards to address consumer harms, illegal content, data protection, anticompetitive practices, algorithmic systems and more”.The hearing focused on the impact of Facebook’s platforms on children, with Haugen likening the appeal of Instagram to tobacco. “It’s just like cigarettes … teenagers don’t have good self-regulation.” Haugen added women would be walking around with brittle bones in 60 years’ time because of the anorexia-related content they found on Facebook platforms.Haugen told lawmakers that Facebook intentionally targets teens and “definitely” targets children as young as eight for the Messenger Kids app. The former Facebook product manager left the company in May after copying tens of thousands of internal documents.A Facebook spokesperson, Andy Stone, said in a tweet during the hearing: “Just pointing out the fact that Frances Haugen 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.”Haugen said that, according to internal documents, Zuckerberg had been given “soft options” to make the Facebook platform less “twitchy” and viral in countries prone to violence but declined to take them because it might affect “meaningful social interactions”, or MSI. She added: “We have a few choice documents that contain notes from briefings with Mark Zuckerberg where he chose metrics defined by Facebook like ‘meaningful social interactions’ over changes that would have significantly decreased misinformation, hate speech and other inciting content.”Haugen said Zuckerberg had built a company that was “very metrics driven”, because the more time people spent on Facebook platforms the more appealing the business was to advertisers. Asked about Zuckerberg’s ultimate responsibility for decisions made at Facebook, she said: “The buck stops with him.”Haugen also warned that Facebook was “literally fanning ethnic violence” in places such as Ethiopia because it was not policing its service adequately outside of the US.Referring to the aftermath of the 6 January storming of the Capitol, as protesters sought to overturn the US presidential election result, Haugen said she was disturbed that Facebook had to “break the glass” and reinstate safety settings that it had put in place for the November poll. Haugen, who worked for the Facebook team that monitored election interference globally, said those precautions had been dropped after Joe Biden’s victory in order to spur growth on the platform.Among the reforms recommended by Haugen were ensuring that Facebook shares internal information and research with “appropriate” oversight bodies such as Congress and removing the influence of algorithms on Facebook’s News Feed by allowing it to be ranked chronologically.Senator Ed Markey said Congress would take action. “Here’s my message for Mark Zuckerberg: your time of invading our privacy, promoting toxic content in preying on children and teens is over,” Markey said. “Congress will be taking action. We will not allow your company to harm our children and our families and our democracy, any longer.”Haugen’s lawyers have also filed at least eight complaints with the US financial watchdog accusing the social media company of serially misleading investors about its approach to safety and the size of its audience.Facebook has issued a series of statements downplaying Haugen’s document leaks, saying: its Instagram research showed that many teenagers found the app helpful; it was investing heavily in security at the expense of its bottom line; polarisation had been growing in the US for decades before Facebook appeared; and the company had “made fighting misinformation and providing authoritative information a priority”.Responding to accusations that Facebook had misled the public and regulators, the company said: “We stand by our public statements and are ready to answer any questions regulators may have about our work.”A Facebook spokesperson said: “Today, a Senate commerce subcommittee held a hearing with a former product manager at Facebook who worked for the company for less than two years, had no direct reports, never attended a decision-point meeting with C-level executives and testified more than six times to not working on the subject matter in question. We don’t agree with her characterization of the many issues she testified about.“Despite all this, we agree on one thing; it’s time to begin to create standard rules for the internet. It’s been 25 years since the rules for the internet have been updated, and instead of expecting the industry to make societal decisions that belong to legislators, it is time for Congress to act.”TopicsFacebookUS CongressSocial networkingUS politicsMark ZuckerbergnewsReuse this content More