Before quitting in May, a Facebook whistleblower had copied thousands of documents from within the company.
Frances Haugen shared her knowledge with The Wall Street Journal's Facebook Files last month.
CBS reported that Facebook addressed only 3-5% of hate incidents on its platform in a study.
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Frances Haugen, a Facebook whistleblower, claimed that Facebook only addressed 3-5% hate on its platform despite being "the most effective" at it. This was according to documents copied by CBS's "60 Minutes."
The Wall Street Journal published the Facebook Files series last month with the assistance of an anonymous whistleblower. According to the reports, Facebook's leaders and researchers were aware of the harm their platform was causing, but they were not making it public or taking proactive steps to address them.
According to the company's internal research, Instagram, which is owned and operated by Facebook, can make teenage girls more susceptible to suicidal thoughts, eating disorders, and suicide.
Frances Haugen (a former product manager) revealed that she became a whistleblower after becoming frustrated with the way her company dealt with potential harmful content.
Haugen took thousands of pages of internal documents with her when she left in May. According to the Washington Post, Haugen filed at least eight complaints with Securities and Exchange Commission and shared these documents with federal authorities.
CBS reviewed one of the documents. It was from a study that CBS did this year. The report stated that "we may not act as little as 3-5% hate and about 6-tenths 1% V & I [violence, incitement] on Facebook, despite being the best in its field."
Haugen stated that the company puts its own interests above the public good in an interview with Scott Pelley of CBS.
"The conflict of interest that Facebook displayed was something I observed over and over at Facebook was the inconsistency between what was best for the public and what was best for Facebook. Haugen stated that Facebook has repeatedly chosen to optimize for its own interest, such as making more money.
Haugen, who also worked for companies such as Google and Pinterest, stated that the impact of Facebook was "substantially more severe" than anything he'd ever seen.
According to the whistleblower, the documents she obtained are evidence that Facebook lies about its progress in combating hate, violence and misinformation.
Insider was told by Lena Pietsch (Director of Policy Communications at Facebook), that the claim that Facebook wasn’t doing enough to combat harmful content was false.
Pietsch stated that "we've invested heavily into people and technology in order to keep our platform secure, and have made fighting misinformation a priority and providing authoritative information an important priority." Pietsch stated that if any research had found a solution to these complex problems, it would have been long before the tech industry, governments, or society could solve them. Our track record is strong in using both our research and external research, and in close collaboration with experts and other organizations to inform the development of our apps.
