Facebook whistleblower calls for transparency in social media, AI

Frances Haugen says navigating the digital world requires a North Star

Frances Haugen, a transparency and accountability advocate known for blowing the whistle on Facebook, believes the tech industry needs to find a North Star to navigate through ethical and privacy risks.

Speaking at the DataGrail Summit in Half Moon Bay, California, Haugen drew a metaphorical parallel between the moral drift seen at technology companies and the frequent shipwrecks that occurred from the 16th century until around 1736 when John Harrison developed the first reliable maritime timekeeper for the measurement of longitude.

Haugen knows well that the North Star can be used to calculate latitude and not longitude. Her point is that steering an economy based on intangible things like software and financial services requires a different set of guiding principles and safety practices than those that evolved from the tangible risks of the industrial era.

"The reason why one in five ships was disappearing on the way to India [from 1550 to 1650] was because when we drift, the consequences are really serious," said Haugen. "The intangible economy opens up another opportunity for us to drift off course because when we stop having absolute references, we end up in a very similar situation."

As an example, Haugen cited her experience at Facebook.

"Over the two years I spent on Facebook, I realized that over and over again, Facebook was facing trade-offs," she said with regard to content moderation.

These trade-offs "were invisible to me," and Facebook staff "had learned to not see there were implicit choices. But every time they resolved those, because of the corporate culture, they would end up on the side of profits instead of optimizing for what was good for people," Haugen noted.

To correct our course, she argues for a way to measure, navigate, and understand the world of social media, AI models, and other aspects of the unseen digital world.

Most social media platforms have no transparency metrics

"Most social media platforms have no transparency metrics," Haugen pointed out. "How do we actually compare between these products?"

"The question is, as we move from [a] world that we can inspect, that we can all agree exists, to a world where we can't agree what it is, [where] we all see a different thing, how do our safety rituals need to change?"

Haugen said part of the reason that car companies don't cut corners on safety is that they know people can conduct independent crash tests to assess vehicle safety. "In a world where we can't each inspect a system, we don't have those same rituals of safety."

Underscoring her point is the decision by her former employer, rebranded as Meta in a bid to shed its scandal-prone past, to discontinue its transparency tool CrowdTangle. And that's to say nothing of recent claims by social media researchers in Brazil that Meta's attorneys tried to discredit reporting on scam ads, the resistance of other social media platforms to scrutiny and accountability, or political pressure on academic researchers.

"When we look at most big tech companies…the only expectation we have on transparency and clarity is around profit and loss numbers," said Haugen.

Instead, she suggests, companies can do more to promote data transparency and governance. And they will have to do more to accommodate the evolving data privacy laws.

Haugen pointed to the more than 40 states suing Meta over alleged harm to children and related incidents as the catalyst for further legislation.

"We can work together," she urged. "We can shape a future that is going to work for all of us, where we're not afraid to innovate, where we're able to move forward and make the most impact out of these technologies." ®