The whistleblower who released the internal investigation into the harm Instagram is doing to teens has come out. It concerns a 37-year-old American data scientist who worked for two years at the social media company.
The whistleblower, Frances Haugen, made herself known on the CBS interview program 60 Minutes. The reason was that she noticed that Facebook again and again chose profit over user safety. That’s why she took with her tens of thousands of pages of internal research when she left in May about the impact of Facebook’s products on people and democracies.
For example, those internal investigations revealed that European political parties felt compelled to adopt positions that they actually did not want to adopt. “The parties said they felt compelled to take positions that are bad for society. But they know that if they don’t take those positions, they won’t win in the social media marketplace.”
Haugen was also the one who provided the internal research on Instagram’s impact on teens to The Wall Street Journal. Meanwhile, Facebook has halted work on an Instagram version for children. With the publications, the data scientist hopes to encourage politicians to introduce more regulations for social media. She doesn’t think that comes from the company itself. “Nobody at Facebook is evil, but the incentives are wrong, aren’t they? Facebook makes more money when you consume more content. People consume more content when it evokes a strong emotional response. The more they deal with anger, the more they do on Facebook.”