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The whistleblower who testified about the social harms of Facebook and its products in the US Congress says major online platforms invested heavily in safety measures after her disclosures, only to wind them back, and any progress has instead come from government action.

When Frances Haugen left Facebook in 2021 she took documents that provided compelling evidence of wide-ranging harms, such as knowingly promoting misinformation and hate speech and pushing eating disorder content to teenagers using the photo-sharing app Instagram.

Former Facebook worker Frances Haugen’s revelations led to regulatory changes around the world.Credit: Eddie Jim

But Haugen, who is in Australia for the South by Southwest conference in Sydney next week, said any action from major companies was shortlived.

Elon Musk bought Twitter in October 2022, when huge numbers of employees left the company as the billionaire removed most of the platform’s content moderation and reinstated banned accounts.

Haugen said with no consequences for Musk’s actions, Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg followed suit by axing thousands of staff, many working on safety features.

Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, sacked 10,000 employees, closed 5000 open roles this year and has started letting people opt out of its fact-checking program.

“There were no transparency laws that were operational at the time, and the platforms took advantage of that fact to be able to cut corners,” Haugen said.

“In a world where more and more of our economy will be run by opaque technologies, whistleblowers will only become more important.”

A Meta spokesperson said the company had spent billions of dollars on safety and security.

“We don’t agree with the claims made by Ms Haugen. If our platforms aren’t safe, people won’t want to use them. While the company did undertake layoffs earlier this year, safety and security remain key priorities,” the spokesperson said.

X was contacted for comment.

On the positive side, Haugen said governments around the world had been emboldened to act.

Major online platforms invested heavily in safety measures after Haugen’s disclosure, only to wind them back.Credit: Reuters

She shared tens of thousands of pages of the internal Facebook documents with The Wall Street Journal, the US Securities and Exchange Commission, and the US Congress. Haugen went on to testify not only to Congress but to the European and UK parliaments and the French Senate and National Assembly, and to file a series of complaints to Congress about Facebook allegedly misleading the public and investors.

“Last year I went to Brussels and went to a session of parliament, and they talked about how they were able to pass this law because of the information in my disclosures,” she said.

“They saw they can no longer live in a world where they just took for granted that … they could trust the platforms to tell the truth. They needed to have regulatory powers.”

The European Union passed the Digital Services Act in July 2022, which had been stalled for several years before Haugen’s disclosures, and includes transparency requirements that force platforms to share the algorithms used for recommendations. The EU has also recently passed whistleblower protection laws.

In the US, the Surgeon-General issued one of its rare health advisories warning that social media harmed teenagers’ mental health. Haugen said this removed ambiguity from the debate, paving the way for legislation or a class action lawsuit.

Australia had already passed the Online Safety Act 2021 just months before Haugen’s disclosures became public. The law, which came into effect in 2022, expanded the powers of the regulator, eSafety, and has been used so far to tackle child sexual abuse on various platforms.

In June, e-Safety commissioner Julie Inman Grant also used her regulatory powers to demand answers from X, formerly known as Twitter, on a rise in hate speech reports since Musk bought the platform, a process that is still under way. She told this masthead that the company did not respond to her earlier letter that warned about an expected rise in hate speech against Indigenous Australians during the Voice referendum debate.

Inman Grant said she was excited that Haugen would be speaking at SXSW because the whistleblower was coming from a place of “deep expertise and deep knowledge”.

“She says things that are going to be shocking to the everyday person about what actually happens behind the scenes,” Inman Grant said. “I have some of that same knowledge, but I can’t apply it as a regulator, there has to be a degree of fairness and removal of my personal experience.” (Inman Grant worked at Twitter before eSafety).

Haugen is based in Puerto Rico, where she moved during the pandemic, and has founded a non-profit organisation, Beyond the Screen, which is working on building capacity in accountability and safety across social media and technology platforms.

Haugen has also recently published her memoir, The Power of One: How I Found the Strength to Tell the Truth and Why I Blew the Whistle on Facebook.

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