Facebook is having a frowny-face emoticon week.
The unprecedented outage of Facebook, Instagram and the company’s other social media sites came hours after a former executive-turned-whistleblower spilled the beans on its corporate malfeasance on “60 Minutes.” A day after Facebook’s meltdown, the whistleblower testified in Congress.
The whistleblower, Frances Haugen, has gone viral and then some. She is a pox on the House of Zuckerberg, but her revelations that drag his empire’s machinations into the light have the potential to be a healing tonic for a weary, divided public.
Facebook, much as it is used and relied upon by people, businesses and organizations around the world, acts like a pariah in the corporate suites.
Haugen trotted out internal documents showing the company manipulates users and actively chooses practices that amplify misinformation. In some cases, this leads to real-world harm.
The details are jaw-dropping, but Haugen sums them up like so: “Facebook, over and over again, has shown it chooses profit over safety.”
Haugen is having a moment that will transcend clickbait. She should be applauded for speaking up and speaking out. It takes guts to speak truth to power — especially one as omnipotent as Facebook.
What Haugen is saying may finally bring a powerful, reckless and thus far unaccountable monopoly to heel.
That said, let’s be candid: Haugen is largely confirming with company receipts what is already storied about Facebook. We’ve known the gist of the sexist frat boy DNA of the company and founder Mark Zuckerberg since they were critically dramatized in the Oscar-winning film “The Social Network.”
In 2011.
A decade later, after our nation’s Capitol was ransacked by a lie-fueled mob bent on stopping the legitimate transfer of power on Jan. 6, it became clear that Facebook had done next to nothing to tamp down not just on misinformation, but on speech that had explicitly threatened violence.
As New York Times reporters Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang chronicled this year in “The Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination,” Facebook has a troubling pattern. The company permits speech promoting hate and violence, then when violence occurs, the company publicly apologizes and moves on. The cycle repeats with the next inevitable crisis it helped stir up by failing to moderate its worst elements.
What Haugen brought to the table is explosive evidence that Facebook executives have chosen to propagate hateful, inflammatory content because they see this as a perpetual money-making strategy.
Let’s face it: They’ve been right.
Now that the cards are on the table, even some Facebook executives are acknowledging the company needs regulation. They’re right about that, too. But Congress should consider whether the company is redeemable at this point. Smaller monopolies have been smashed into pieces for less egregious conduct. Maybe that’s what should happen to Facebook.
That said, social media users bear some responsibility for the state of things, too. There is always the option to turn away. For some users, though, studies have found social media can be more addictive than alcohol or cigarettes. And with addiction comes denial. Too many of us ignored the elephant in our smartphones for far too long. The public has, at long last, been jarred to attention.
Facebook has a black eye right now, and not just because it went dark for several hours Monday. The company’s culture has been dark for a long, long time, for anyone who’s bothered to look beneath the surface.
