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Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen on Tuesday told lawmakers that the company systematically and repeatedly prioritized profits over the safety of its users, painting a detailed picture of an organization where hunger to grow governed decisions, with little concern for the impact on society.

Her Senate committee testimony — based on her experience working for the company’s civic integrity division and thousands of documents she took with her before leaving in May — sought to highlight what she called a structure of incentivization, created by Facebook’s leadership and implemented throughout the company. By directing resources away from important safety programs and encouraging platform tweaks to fuel growth, these performance metrics dictated operations, Haugen said, a design that encouraged political divisions, mental health harms and even violence.

She pointed to Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg as the enforcer of this system, arguing that he controls the most important decisions made at the company.

Former Facebook employee Frances Haugen revealed as ‘whistleblower’ behind leaked documents that plunged the company into scandal

“Until the incentives change, Facebook will not change. Left alone, Facebook will continue to make choices that go against the common good, our common good,” she said.

The hearing signaled the start of a new crisis for Facebook in Washington, galvanizing lawmakers from both parties around regulatory efforts to tamp down on what they say is a wide-ranging set of the societal ills prompted by the social media giant. Repeatedly, senators compared the company to Big Tobacco, purveyors of products that are addictive and profitable but ultimately bad. The tobacco industry was ultimately contained by landmark regulation, an action lawmakers promised to replicate.

“I think the time has come for action, and I think you are the catalyst for that action,” Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) told Haugen during the hearing.

Facebook Crisis: Interview with John Tye, Whistleblower Attorney

The Senate panel hearing was Haugen’s first public appearance after she revealed herself Sunday evening as the source of thousands of pages of internal company research leaked to the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Wall Street Journal. Throughout, Haugen gave a detailed account of the ways she said Facebook employees are incentivized to turn a blind eye to problems its services cause, coupling her own experiences at the company with data from the internal Facebook documents she took with her.

Already revelations from the documents have intensified concerns on Capitol Hill about Facebook’s influence, particularly on children’s and teens’ mental health, a topic expected to be the key focus of the hearing. But Haugen and lawmakers covered huge swaths of ground, touching on national security risks, the spread of misinformation and the deadly mob attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6.

Congress is not as clueless about Facebook as it seems

As she was speaking, Facebook’s representatives tweeted and emailed talking points rebutting Haugen’s testimony. One of their main points: Haugen didn’t work on many of the issues, including teenagers and child safety, that were covered in the documents that she downloaded.

After weeks of silence on Haugen’s revelations, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg pushed back on her testimony in an email to employees on Tuesday, writing that it’s “just not true” that the company prioritizes profit over safety.

“We care deeply about issues like safety, well-being and mental health,” he wrote in the email, which he also posted on Facebook. “It’s difficult to see coverage that misrepresents our work and our motives. At the most basic level, I think most of us just don’t recognize the false picture of the company that is being painted.”

He said he was particularly concerned about the questions being raised about Facebook’s impact on kids, and he committed to doing more research on the issue and making research publicly available.

Haugen brought specific examples from her time at the company. Because of understaffing, she recognized a pattern where there was “implicit discouragement” from building rigorous systems to detect problematic content, she said. Haugen saw this play out in her work on counterespionage, in which her team could only handle about a third of the cases it was made aware of. If Facebook had invested in building a detector, the team knew it would have many more cases.

Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) raised concerns about Facebook executive Antigone Davis’s testimony to Congress last week that Facebook had removed 600,000 accounts in a three-month period of children younger than 13. Haugen said that there are probably far more children on the platform, and that the company has ways to determine people’s ages.

“Facebook could do substantially more to detect more of those children, and they should have to publish for Congress those processes … they could be much more effective than probably what they’re doing,” Haugen said.

Zuckerberg’s apologies have been a staple of Facebook scandals. Now, the company offers defiance.

She also said she provided documents to Congress that show Zuckerberg knew the company could have intervened to prevent the spread of hate speech and misinformation in at-risk countries, but he did not, because it would have negatively affected “meaningful social interaction,” a key metric Facebook uses to measure communications between family and friends. Haugen said the company tied the metric to employees’ bonuses and chose not to make changes that could cost Facebook money.

“People stay or leave the company based on what they get paid, and if you hurt MSI, a bunch of people aren’t going to get their bonuses,” Haugen said.

During congressional testimony and on other occasions, Zuckerberg has insisted that the company does not reward employees based on how much time people spend on the platform. But on Monday, Facebook representatives declined to answer whether rewards or other incentives for employees were tied to the performance of the algorithm.

Engagement-based ranking, which Facebook uses to prioritize posts in people’s feeds that are more likely to elicit reactions — and therefore, clicks — also concerned Haugen. The downside is the recommendation of divisive or harmful content. That has led to Facebook’s algorithms causing teens to be exposed to more anorexia content, encouraging rifts within families, and fueling ethnic violence in Ethiopia, she told lawmakers.

Facebook could shift to posts being ranked in other ways, such as chronologically, and still remain profitable, she said. That argument resonated with lawmakers.

“This company could be vastly profitable but so much safer,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) said during a news conference after the hearing. “They’ve just chosen the greediest path. … If they took a little bit less money but emphasized Facebook in the way they apply algorithms, they could help save lives.”

Facebook has long said that it made the change to its news feed algorithm to prioritize what types of interaction people found most valuable, and the shift was made in the context of a bigger prioritization of friends, family and groups over news publishers. News outlets, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/01/31/facebook-shares-drop-after-u-s-user-growth-stalls/" target=_blank>including The Washington Post</a>, reported at the time that engagement among younger U.S. users was slowing, and Facebook was interested in finding ways to boost time spent on the platform.

Today, the company says its news feed algorithm takes in more than 10,000 data points when deciding what content to show people, and some of those data points include promoting trustworthy publishers and demoting those that are known to publish clickbait. But engagement — or the amount of likes, clicks, views and shares that a post generates — is still one of the most heavily weighted parts of the algorithm, executives have said.

The wide-ranging revelations marked a stark departure from dozens of other Capitol Hill technology hearings, where lawmakers have grilled company executives. These leaders largely gave non-answers, in contrast to the open and frank information that Haugen delivered on Tuesday.

Haugen’s call for regulation of Facebook was expansive and ambitious. She asked lawmakers to “break out of previous regulatory frames.” She warned lawmakers that some of the most widely debated proposals, including privacy protections or tweaks to Section 230, a decades-old law that protects companies from lawsuits over what users post, would be insufficient.

She proposed changing Section 230 to make Facebook responsible for “the consequences of their intentional ranking decisions.”

Gaining such expansive oversight of Facebook’s closed design will be an uphill battle for lawmakers, who have publicly called for regulation of social media for years but have been unable to pass bipartisan proposals that would force greater transparency. Tuesday’s hearing crystallized that while lawmakers are collectively outraged over Haugen’s allegations, there is little consensus about exactly what kind of legislation they might advance. Lawmakers name-dropped individual bills that they have introduced during the hearing, including proposals that would address children’s online privacy and bills that would increase transparency around tech companies’ algorithms.

Lawmakers from both parties have become increasingly motivated to pass stronger competition laws, and some bills would probably result in a breakup of Facebook’s existing business. But Haugen warned lawmakers against breaking up the company, arguing that it needs all the profitability it can get to properly police itself, especially in areas such as Africa where Facebook-owned services are the primary way people access the Internet.

“If you split Facebook and Instagram apart, it’s likely that most advertising dollars will go to Instagram and Facebook will continue to be this Frankenstein that is endangering lives around the world,” she said. “Only now there won’t be money to fund it.”

The revelations amount to perhaps the most significant crisis in Facebook’s history, one in a slew of such scandals over the years, but Zuckerberg did not publicly comment on them until Tuesday night. Blumenthal said the Facebook chief needs to testify before the committee about Haugen’s revelations.

“No apology, no admissions, no acknowledgment, nothing to see here, we are going to deflect it and go sailing,” said Blumenthal, referencing the CEO’s frequent social media photos of his activities on the water.

This will probably not be Haugen’s last appearance on Capitol Hill. She told lawmakers that Facebook’s consistent understaffing of counter-espionage staff is a national security concern, and that she is talking about it with members of Congress. Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), a member of the select committee to investigate the Jan. 6 riot, said that committee would need to hear from her about Facebook’s role in the violence at the Capitol.

Blumenthal also called for both the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Trade Commission to investigate Haugen’s revelations. Haugen’s lawyers have made at least eight complaints to the SEC, which has broad oversight of financial markets and the power to bring charges against companies that mislead investors.

Blumenthal is hopeful that Haugen’s decision to speak will inspire other tech workers who wish to expose similar concerns.

“I think there are other truth-tellers in the tech world who want to go forward, and I think you are leading by example,” he said. Haugen is “showing them that there’s a path to make this industry more responsible and more caring about kids and about the nature of our public discourse.”

Capitol Hill

To many Facebook critics, the harms laid out by Haugen amount to a powerful argument in favor of breaking up the company. After all, she accused it of “moral bankruptcy” and painted a picture of a firm obsessed with growth and profit even at the cost of its own users’ well-being.

So it may come as a surprise to some that aggressive antitrust enforcement is not in fact one of Haugen’s recommendations. “I’m actually against the breaking-up of Facebook,” she said in Tuesday’s hearing.

“If you split Facebook and Instagram apart, it’s likely that most advertising dollars would go to Instagram, and Facebook will continue to be this Frankenstein that is endangering lives around the world,” she explained. “Only now there won’t be money to fund” the work Facebook does on content moderation, enforcing its rules and researching its societal impacts. “And so I think oversight and regulatory oversight and finding collaborative solutions with Congress is going to be key because these systems are going to continue to exist and be dangerous, even if broken up.”

The stand might sound counterintuitive: After all, much of Haugen’s testimony was about how Facebook systematically de-prioritizes such work when it threatens the company’s engagement metrics. But it’s a more coherent view than it might seem at first blush.

After all, Facebook’s monopoly-like profit margins are what make it possible for it to even consider prioritizing things other than short-term business imperatives. One need only look to smaller social platforms throughout the years, including Yik Yak, Omegle or Clubhouse, to see that they tend to invest first in growth and getting users hooked because that’s the only way to survive in a hotly competitive market. Only once a platform reaches a scale at which it feels comfortable in the competitive landscape does it begin to build out content moderation and trust and safety teams of any significant scale.

In contrast, a landscape dominated by one or a few massive platforms is arguably simpler to effectively regulate — although the history of regulation of Facebook, which includes a $5 billion Federal Trade Commission fine that the company brushed off like a gnat, is not particularly encouraging, either.

That’s not to say there aren’t very good arguments out there for breaking up Facebook. It’s just that such an intervention would be unlikely to solve, on its own, the problems Haugen is most concerned with.

Will Oremus

Even after the hearing, Facebook escalated its attempts to undermine Haugen’s credibility on the issues she spoke about — using Haugen’s own candor against her.

“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," said Lena Pietsch, director of policy communications.

Facebook then reiterated its talking points that it agrees that Congress should overhaul how the Internet is regulated. While hearings tend to gain a lot of attention, any effort to overhaul laws would be months in the making and could be influenced by Facebook, which is one of the biggest spenders on lobbying in Washington.

What parents need to know about social media for kids

Elizabeth Dwoskin

The top Democrat on the Senate panel that heard testimony from Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen said Tuesday that CEO Mark Zuckerberg should testify before the committee.

“Mark Zuckerberg should appear,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), chair of Senate Commerce consumer-protection subcommittee, told reporters after the hearing. “If he is in any way in disagreement with anything that has been said here, he’s the one that ought to come forward, he’s the one that’s in charge.”

Blumenthal’s panel has been investigating concerns that Facebook and other social media platforms harm children, and he has said he plans to bring in officials from other companies to testify, too.

How Facebook’s ‘metaverse’ became a political strategy in Washington 

Blumenthal said he hoped to make plans for additional hearings “very soon.”

It would mark the latest of many appearance for Zuckerberg on Capitol Hill, where he’s been called up to address concerns about competition, misinformation and other issues.

Blumenthal said regulators at the Federal Trade Commission and at the Securities and Exchange Commission should be investigating “a number of the deceptive and misleading claims that have been made to the public, to consumers, to investors.”

Cristiano Lima-Strong

Senator reads a father's text message blaming Instagram for his daughter's mental health issues

The Senate hearing featuring testimony from a Facebook whistleblower adjourned just before 1:30 p.m., after lawmakers heard hours of testimony from Frances Haugen offering withering criticism of the tech giant.

It was a packed house in the Senate hearing room for most of the session, as senators dug into concerns about how the social network has handled everything from kids’ safety to medical misinformation and beyond.

Only Facebook knows the extent of its misinformation problem. And it’s not sharing, even with the White House.

Haugen told lawmakers she believes Facebook is ill-equipped to quash the spread of medical misinformation on its platforms, an issue that has drawn major scrutiny among Democrats on Capitol Hill.

“I do not believe Facebook [as its] currently structured has the capability to stop vaccine misinformation, because they are overly reliant on artificial reliant systems,” she said.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), who posed a question on the matter to Haugen, replied, “And yet it’s a company that [has a market cap that is] over a trillion dollars, one of the world’s biggest companies that we’ve ever known, and that’s what really bothers me.”

Klobuchar and other Democrats have proposed legislation that could open tech companies like Facebook up to lawsuits for hosting medical misinformation during health crises.

During the exchange, Haugen also expressed concern about Facebook’s ability to police misinformation in languages other than English, and sharply criticized the company for releasing parts of its research with annotations that minimized its own employee’s findings.

“The fact that Facebook is throwing them under the bus is unacceptable, and I just want the researchers to know that I stand with them and that I see them,” Haugen said.

Zuckerberg is questioned before a Senate committee.

In the pantheon of Facebook scandals, the whistleblower affair shares space with the Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal, Russian election interference and the platform’s role in facilitating the Myanmar genocide. Through each of those, the company has emerged with its reputation battered but its business intact. Facebook reported record revenue last quarter of nearly $30 billion, and it boasts a staggering 3.5 billion users across its platforms, which include WhatsApp and Instagram.

So what’s different this time? On the surface, not much. Though Tuesday’s hearing has brought damming testimony, company is facing its latest public relations crisis with <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/10/04/zuckerbergs-apologies-have-been-staple-facebook-scandals-now-company-offers-defiance/?itid=lk_inline_manual_96" target=_blank>a defiant tone</a>, projecting confidence that this, too, will pass as Facebook turns its focus to <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/09/24/facebook-washington-strategy-metaverse/?itid=lk_inline_manual_96" target=_blank>building the metaverse</a>.

While the company’s stock price has slid amid the reports of troubling internal research on topics such as its moderation practices and how Instagram affects teen girls’ mental health, some of that drop was due to an extended outage Monday, not the company’s PR woes. It remained up more than 20 percent since the start of 2021.

Still, the New York Times’ Kevin Roose proposed Monday that <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/04/technology/facebook-files.html">Facebook is weaker than it looks</a> — a company whose best days are behind it — not because of lawsuits or regulatory pressure, but because it’s losing young users, “tastemakers” and market share to rivals such as TikTok.

There may be some truth to Roose’s take. Between TikTok, YouTube and Snapchat, Facebook faces more viable competitors for young people’s social media time today than it has in many years. TikTok passed Facebook Messenger as the world’s <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/business-58155103">most-downloaded app in 2020</a>, according to the analytics firm App Annie, and recently topped <a href="https://newsroom.tiktok.com/en-us/1-billion-people-on-tiktok">1 billion active users</a>.

Yet every time an aspect of Facebook’s business takes a hit, the company finds a way to keep growing. It regained traction with teens by buying Instagram and WhatsApp, fended off Snapchat by copying Snapchat Stories, and juiced engagement on Facebook with algorithm updates. At this point, its social graph is so vast, its data trove so rich, its resources so deep that it appears nearly impregnable to conventional competitive or regulatory threats. In 2019, the Federal Trade Commission hit Facebook with <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/07/22/facebook-vs-feds-inside-story-multi-billion-dollar-tech-giants-privacy-war-with-washington/?itid=lk_inline_manual_100">the largest fine in FTC history</a> — $5 billion — and it didn’t even leave a dent.

Facebook again asks judge to dismiss FTC antitrust complaint, arguing it lacks ‘valid factual basis’

The bar for declaring that Facebook is on the decline, at this point in its history, should be high. I’ve been writing about Facebook for a decade, and nearly every year of that period has brought claims that the company was headed for a fall. A sampling:

In 2013, it was declared <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/dec/27/facebook-dead-and-buried-to-teens-research-finds">“dead and buried” among teens</a> in a European study.

In 2014, Princeton researchers predicted that it was about to <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/is-facebook-fading-social-media-giant-could-lose-80-percent-of-users-study-says/">lose 80 percent of its users</a>.

In 2016, the Information reported that a <a href="https://www.theinformation.com/articles/facebook-struggles-to-stop-decline-in-original-sharing">decline in original sharing</a> by users had Facebook fearing for its future.

In 2019, the Guardian reported that <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jun/20/facebook-usage-collapsed-since-scandal-data-shows">shares and likes were down 20 percent</a> because of privacy concerns.

It’s conceivable that this scandal could be different. If it triggers an exodus of talent from Facebook, tips the scales toward new antitrust laws that keep it from buying up rivals, or sparks an enduring movement among teens or parents to boycott Instagram, the company’s outlook might yet dim.

But the Internet of 2021 is no longer the freewheeling frontier that saw titans such as Yahoo and Myspace rapidly rise and fall in the 1990s and 2000s.

Facebook and its fellow tech giants — Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and Google — have enjoyed a period of sustained growth that rivals any in business history, partly because each offers an array of interconnected services that draw strength from one another. They’re like octopi that regrow their tentacles. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

That run of success probably won’t last forever, but it will take something more than another round of nasty headlines and harsh words from Congress to change it.

Frances Haugen

One of Haugen’s more explosive comments was about how misinformation reaches the most vulnerable people on the platform.

She noted that Facebook’s own research showed that widows and people who move to new cities — people who have the potential to be socially isolated — are the ones who are most exposed to misinformation. She said that her colleagues would refer to this exposure as a “misinformation burden,” the idea that the further people go down rabbit holes, the more socially isolated they become.

“It breaks my heart … that these rabbit holes would suck people down and make it hard to connect with others,” Haugen said.

Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

How to block Facebook from snooping on you

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) said Tuesday that Haugen’s decision to come forward will serve as an example to other whistleblowers in the tech industry who want to speak out about harms their companies may be causing.

“I think there are other whistleblowers out there,” he told Haugen. “I think there are other truth-tellers in the tech world who want to go forward, and I think you are leading by example.”

Blumenthal, chair of the subcommittee hosting Tuesday’s session, added that Haugen is “showing them that there’s a path to make this industry more responsible and more caring about kids and about the nature of our public discourse.”

Haugen opened a fresh can of worms as she noted her last job at Facebook was working on a “counterespionage team.”

She did not offer many details but said her job involved trying to track how the Chinese might be using the platform to spy on Uyghurs, an ethnic minority in northwestern China that has been heavily surveilled and persecuted.

Haugen also said that the team looked into Iranian spying on the platform.

Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) suggested those issues might provoke another congressional hearing.

Haugen agreed. “I have strong national security concerns about how Facebook operates today,” she said.

An earlier version of this post misidentified Sen. Dan Sullivan as Scott.

Ted Cruz

A bipartisan group of senators said Tuesday they support issuing subpoenas to Facebook to obtain the full text of research disclosed by Haugen, which the company has declined to release.

Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) told The Washington Post during a break in Tuesday’s hearing that they both back the idea of the Senate Commerce Committee compelling the tech giant to provide its internal findings. Sen. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) told a scrum of reporters he also supports the move, just before the session reconvened after noon.

“One hundred percent, we should get every bit of information from Facebook,” Markey said when asked about the prospect. “It should be a bipartisan subpoena from this committee that ensures that all the documentation is out for the public to see.”

Meet the Facebook whistleblower, Frances Haugen

If the full committee, chaired by Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), authorizes issuing subpoenas, it would mark a dramatic standoff between Congress and Facebook over the findings.

Ahead of a Senate hearing last week, Facebook released redacted and annotated research decks for two of their internal investigations. The company has said it is exploring releasing additional research.

But Nick Clegg, Facebook’s global affairs chief, pushed back during a CNN interview Sunday morning on calls for the company to make the full findings public.

Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), the committee’s top Republican, said of issuing subpoenas: “It should be discussed.”

Klobuchar said just getting more information from the company won’t be enough, though.

“We can investigate and investigate. We need action,” she told The Post.

Former Facebook employee and whistleblower Frances Haugen testifies during a hearing entitled 'Protecting Kids Online: Testimony from a Facebook Whistleblower' in Washington

Haugen said she believes Facebook would still be a profitable company if it did away with engagement-based ranking, which prioritizes content that users are most likely to click on or react to.

“A lot of the changes I’m talking about are not going to make Facebook an unprofitable company,” she said. “It just won’t be a ludicrously profitable company like it is today.”

Haugen is seeking to make the case that Facebook has continually prioritized its own profits and growth over user safety. She said that the company makes about $40 billion a year in profit. She called for scrutiny of the algorithms and the impact that they have on promoting dangerous content.

“People would consume less content on Facebook, but Facebook would still be profitable,” she said.

She argued that if Facebook were less toxic and had more oversight, there’s a possibility Facebook could be more profitable over the long term.

Cat Zakrzewski

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The debate over social media regulation will, at some point, focus on concrete policy proposals. But at this stage, in hearings such as the one Tuesday on Capitol Hill, the focus is on defining and diagnosing the nature of the problem with platforms such as Facebook.

That often plays out as a battle of analogies: To get our heads around what type of problem Facebook represents, we naturally turn to disruptive technologies and problematic industries of the past.

Whistleblower Frances Haugen and lawmakers at Tuesday’s hearing have repeatedly compared Big Tech to Big Tobacco — as purveyors of products that are addictive and profitable but ultimately bad for us.

“When we realized Big Tobacco was hiding the harms, that caused the government to take action,” Haugen said, calling on lawmakers to do the same with Facebook.

Facebook is like chairs. No, telephones. No, cars. No …

Facebook has similarly deployed such analogies throughout its history, often to rationalize its downsides and caution against overreaction to its problems. It has <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/09/24/facebook-instagram-mosseri-cars/?itid=lk_inline_manual_152" target=_blank>compared itself</a> over the years to cars, chairs, telephones, the printing press, even Little League and churches — tools and institutions that have gained wide societal acceptance.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), who chairs the Senate consumer-protection subcommittee, has said Facebook is “facing a Big Tobacco moment, a moment of reckoning.”

What makes the tobacco analogy particularly apt with respect to Haugen is that the tobacco companies hid and mischaracterized their own research on their products’ harms, just as she accuses Facebook of doing. (There’s also the parallel of marketing to teens a product that is hazardous to their health.)

It’s a potent charge, because Facebook executives, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg, have historically presented themselves as well-intentioned innovators who simply couldn’t have foreseen the downsides of their creations but are now doing their best to address them. Haugen’s contention is that this is a lie: Far from doing its best, Facebook is consistently choosing its business interests over policy and product reforms that would mitigate its ugliest impacts.

The tobacco analogy has its limits, though. As Evan Greer, director of the nonprofit Fight for the Future, has pointed out, social media has <a href="https://twitter.com/evan_greer/status/1306341576742854656">societal upsides that tobacco doesn’t</a>. For instance, Facebook and other social platforms make it possible for marginalized voices and social movements to reach wide audiences directly, without the filter of mainstream media gatekeepers.

What’s sometimes overlooked in the analogies to older technologies, including telephones and cars, is that they actually did raise major safety and trust concerns and that these concerns were addressed partly through regulation, liability and the threat thereof. AT&amp;T was forced to choose in the 1910s between being tightly regulated, like a utility, and facing a likely antitrust breakup. (It chose the former.) Early automakers were in some cases producing shoddy death traps until a court ruling that exposed them to lawsuits for the resulting accidents.

It’s becoming clear that Facebook’s path to wide acceptance is unlikely to avoid regulation. Now the question is exactly what laws, if any, could make us as comfortable with Facebook as we are with telephones and the printing press.

The hearing has reconvened. So far, Frances Haugen has come across as measured and credible, even noting at several moments that she did not work on specific issues that she was being questioned about.

But that candor has become ammunition for Facebook’s public relations team. Each time Haugen said she didn’t work on something — particularly on issues relating to teenagers and child safety on Instagram — the company’s communications executives have tweeted to highlight that.

It’s also part of the company’s messaging to employees, that Haugen doesn’t know as much as she says, according to a person familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to do so publicly, and part of a broader defensive strategy to sow doubt in the documents Haugen has provided.

Brian Boland, a former Facebook vice president who resigned last year, criticized the response as not transparent.

The “research points” uncovered by the whistleblower “are not definitive, but they are red flags,” Boland <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/10/04/zuckerbergs-apologies-have-been-staple-facebook-scandals-now-company-offers-defiance/?itid=lk_inline_manual_165" target=_blank>said</a>. “If you were really concerned about the impact of your product, you would want to chase those red flags and see if they were true or not. You would not be satisfied if your car ran well only 80 percent of the time.”

Senators have repeatedly pressed Facebook executives to pledge that the company will not retaliate against the whistleblower behind the recent string of damaging leaks, since revealed to be Frances Haugen.

But while one Facebook official committed to the company not seeking retribution, another left wiggle room for the tech giant to come after Haugen for disclosing internal research.

Steve Satterfield, vice president of public policy and privacy at Facebook, pledged to lawmakers on the Senate Judiciary Committee last month that the company would not retaliate for the leaks. “Of course it wouldn’t be appropriate to retaliate against anyone,” he said.

But when company officials testified before Congress on Thursday, they changed their tune ever so slightly. Antigone Davis, Facebook’s head of safety, said the company has “committed to not retaliating for them coming to the Senate.”

That leaves the door open for Facebook to potentially take legal action against Haugen for disclosing the documents to the Wall Street Journal, which based a series of reports on her leaks.

Haugen, who revealed her identity on “60 Minutes,” has filed complaints against Facebook to the Securities and Exchange Commission, alleging the company misled investors, according to CBS.

According to her lawyers, she has sought whistleblower protections with the SEC.

John Tye, one of Haugen’s attorneys, noted to CBS that the SEC can shield whistleblowers from retaliation by former employers. <a href="https://www.sec.gov/whistleblower/retaliation">According to the SEC</a>, those protections largely mean a company “may not discharge, demote, suspend, harass, or in any way discriminate” against an employee who reports conduct they “reasonably believed violated the federal securities laws.”

Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen tells lawmakers that meaningful reform is necessary ‘for our common good’

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