Thousands of pages of internal documents leaked by former Facebook product manager turned whistleblower Frances Haugen are now the basis of a damning series of reports called the Facebook Papers being published this week. They show how the company’s choices prioritized profits over safety and how it tried to hide its own research from investors and the public. A new story published this morning by the Associated Press finds the Facebook documents show the platform ignored some of its own researchers’ suggestions for addressing vaccine misinformation.
I think that what Frances Haugen has done is blow the whistle on Facebook’s complicity and its internal knowledge of a number of problematic issues that many of us were alleging that they were engaging with for several years at this time. What Facebook has essentially done, and she has exposed that they were aware of, is play with our emotions, play with our psychologies, play with our anxieties. Those are the raw materials that fuels Facebook’s attempts to be a digital empire. And more generally, this is an example of how this new form of digital capitalism that I believe Facebook is trailblazing is one that is playing with our intimate emotions on every single level.
So, these revelations are extremely important. Right now the timing is very, very important for action to be taken to rein Facebook in, but to also, more generally, understand that this is the general face of Big Tech that we’re seeing more and more exposed in front of us.
— source democracynow.org | Oct 26, 2021