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There’s a fresh round of public hate for Zuckerberg’s monster now that a former employee sat down with 60 Minutes for a tell-all.
Some of what we learned in that interview, we instinctively knew to be true. For example, she talked about what drives the algorithm.
“Facebook has realized that if they change the algorithm to be safer, people will spend less time on the site, they'll click on less ads, they'll make less money,” says Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen. https://t.co/wbxxfgorNE pic.twitter.com/zpQIwcdatr
— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) October 3, 2021
They are looking for engagement.
Emotions drive engagement.
Anger is the easiest emotion to arouse… and so, they have profit incentives to reward the kind of content that is, by nature, divisive and polarizing.
Frances Haugen, a former product manager who revealed herself as the whistleblower behind a series of documents leaked to the Wall Street Journal that exposed its role in contributing to a toxic online environment for teen girls, told ’60 Minutes’ that Facebook applies different rules to high-profile accounts and that the platform played a role in the January 6 attack on the Capitol Building.
“There were conflicts of interest between what was good for the public and what was good for Facebook,” she said in her first public appearance. “Facebook over and over again chose to optimize for its own interests like making more money.” -MSN
Of course, if the events of Jan 6 were organized on Facebook, (a fact that was established within a week of it happening) that fact by itself debunks the whole ‘Trump incited’ narrative we’ve been force-fed for the last 10 months or so.
Here is what she said about their ‘safety’ features being ‘turned off’ after the election.
Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen says Facebook turned on safety systems to reduce misinformation during the 2020 Election. But she says many of the changes were temporary. Facebook says some of the safety systems remained. https://t.co/pwJ8R4RFLx pic.twitter.com/APKtjIGblL
— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) October 3, 2021
Naturally, this is being published by a media arm that works from their basic assumptions that every Democrat talking point about January 6 is incontrovertibly true… the same press that told us the same thing about Russian Collusion for years, and shows no real interest in changing public opinion now that indictments have vindicated Republican allegations that the whole Russia-gate narrative was not just made up out of whole cloth, but was an example of the government being weaponized by one political party against their rivals with malicious intent.
It’s a little hard to take them as the ‘great defenders of Democracy’ when they not only stifled stories harmful to Biden, or helpful to Republicans, but where Zuckerberg literally pumped hundreds of millions of his own dollars with strings-attached dollars with the specific intent on changing how ‘impartial’ election officials work in Democrat-heavy regions of battleground states… tilting the playing ground in favor of the Democrats not through advertising, but by giving Democrat strongholds advantages that voters elsewhere in the state did not have… up to and including drop-box density.
Don’t misunderstand this to mean that Facebook’s problems are limited to political messaging, either. Their own studies about the impact of their social platforms on teenage girls is thoroughly damning, too.
“Facebook's own research says, as these young women begin to consume this eating disorder content, they get more and more depressed. And it actually makes them use [Instagram] more,” says a Facebook whistleblower about Instagram’s impact on teen girls. https://t.co/t5FKY2OtLi pic.twitter.com/yQCuEjDFzs
— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) October 3, 2021
There are two possible reactions to this.
The response from the right would be to declare Facebook is acting like a publisher and allow any aggrieved parties to file their complaints in court.
But considering how Silicon Valley has stocked Biden’s advisors with so many of their own former employees to lobby on their behalf, they will be pressing him to take the other track… government censorship tools that would obligate FB’s various freedom-loving competitors to enforce the same jackboot tactics Facebook has embraced for years.
Judging by the whistleblower’s explicit claim that she wants to see government regulations go into place, we know where she is coming from in this dynamic.
Since she’s revealed her political motivations in this ‘whistleblowing’, we can, and should, take her testimony with a healthy dose of salt. That doesn’t change the fact that some of the complaints she’s raised are valid… we just disagree on what should be done to correct them.
