>>14715579 Whistleblower accusing Facebook of aiding Jan. 6 US Capitol riot
Kek at the end of FB article
Facebook prematurely turned off safeguards designed to thwart misinformation and rabble-rousing after Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in last year’s US elections in a moneymaking move that a company whistleblower alleges contributed to the deadly Jan. 6 invasion of the US Capitol.
The whistleblower, former Facebook product manager Frances Haugen, also asserted during an exclusive interview that aired Sunday on CBS’ “60 Minutes” that a 2018 change to the content flow in Facebook’s news feeds contributed to more divisiveness and ill will in a network ostensibly created to bring people closer together.
Despite the enmity that the new algorithms were feeding, Facebook found that they helped keep people coming back— a pattern that helped the Menlo Park, California, 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 other Silicon Valley companies such as Google and Pinterest. “And Facebook, over and over again, chose to optimize for its own interests, like making more money.”
The backlash has been intensifying since The Wall Street Journal’s mid-September publication of an expose that 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. After copying thousands of pages of Facebook’s internal research, Haugen leaked them to the Journal to provide the foundation for a succession of stories packaged as as the “Facebook Files.”
Haugen, 37, has filed at least eight complaints with US securities regulators alleging Facebook has violated the law by withholding information about the risks posed by its social network, according to “60 Minutes.” Facebook in turn could take legal action against her if it asserts she stole confidential information from the company.
“No one at Facebook is malevolent,” Haugen said during the interview. “But the incentives are misaligned, right? Like, Facebook makes more money when you consume more content. people enjoy engaging with things that elicit an emotional reaction.And the more anger that they get exposed to, the more they interact and the more they consume. “
Yeah, no one at FB is malevolent, but they make billions off the anger thry generate!
https://twitter.com/TimesofIsrael/status/1444803463309762562?s=20