Right after the Facebook outage on Monday, news about the company has been quite controversial because of a whistleblower, Frances Haugen. In case you missed it, she used to work at the company but resigned due to how they work unethically.
The day after the outage, Haugen had a meeting with the US Congress for three hours explaining how Facebook should fix the wrong things. One such example was how the algorithm encourages engagement even if it includes misinformation and 'hate' speech. With that, she said, “engagement-based ranking on Instagram can lead children from very innocuous topics like healthy recipes… to anorexia-promoting content over a very short period of time.”
She also has evidence of documents to back her calling, further stating that Facebook's algorithm is not as effective as the company claimed. In other words, the AI is the one that decides what we focus on even if it was just for a moment. Haugen thinks Facebook could fix this by moving it to a chronological feed in terms of recency instead of engagement.
Besides the algorithm, Haugen also said Section 230 should be reformed. Section 230 is a 1996 law that protects companies from being responsible for what the users say and do on their platform. Should Congress reform section 230, this would "make Facebook responsible for the consequences of their intentional ranking decisions". This could make Facebook undo the engagement algorithm because it would be a liability.
Other notable suggestions from Haugen include the initiative by Facebook itself to encourage slowing down viral posts (like how Twitter prompts users to 'read before sharing'). On top of that, she said Facebook researchers should make their studies accessible to the public especially academics and researchers to understand how algorithms work.
Recently, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said Haugen's claims "don't make sense" and doesn't represent what the company stands for. But what do you think of this whole controversy? Let us know in the comments below and stay tuned for more trending tech news at TechNave.com.
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