Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee and Meta whistleblower, has said that “tens of millions” will die if social media is not overhauled. In an interview with The Sunday Times, Haugen said that her employer at the social media company was putting the company’s “profits over safety” of the employees.
She worked at Facebook until 2021 when she allegedly leaked some confidential documents published by The Wall Street Journal as “The Facebook Files”. These included research reports and employee discussions apparently signifying that the company was aware of the harm its platform was causing.
Based on the documents accessed, the WSJ also reported that Meta downplays the effect of Instagram on a teenager’s mental health and that knows that Facebook services are used to “spread religious hatred in India”.
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Haugen wrote a memoir on her journey since her departure from Facebook where she warned people of the algorithm changes and claimed that Meta’s profits were contingent because no one knew “how large the gap between Facebook’s and Instagram’s public narratives and the truth had grown”,
"A lot of people will die in the next 20 years if we don't solve this problem," she said. The figure could be "tens of millions", she added without further expanding her comment.
In 2021, Haugen appeared before the UK government in a parliament hearing to back their proposal to regulate content on social media platforms. Mark Zuckerberg “has unilateral control over 3 billion people” due to his unassailable position, she had told the MPs, as reported by The Guardian.
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“I am deeply concerned that they have made a product that can lead people away from their real communities and isolate them in these rabbit holes and these filter bubbles. What you find is that when people are sent targeted misinformation to a community, it can make it hard to reintegrate into wider society because now you don’t have shared facts,” she had said in her address, according to the report.
Facebook has faced criticism over its content several times in the past. In 2018, a United Nations probe claimed that Facebook had “substantively contributed” to the Myanmar genocide, Reuters reported. Meanwhile, Instagram’s policy changes, according to a BBC report, were behind the suicide of a British teenager.
