Facebook products 'harm' children, stoke division, weaken democracy: Whistleblower To US lawmakers

Former Facebook employee Frances Haugen on Tuesday (local time) argued at a Senate hearing that Congress needs to require more transparency from the social networking giant.

She accused CEO Mark Zuckerberg of pushing for higher profits while being cavalier about user safety.

"I am here today because I believe that Facebook's products harm children, stoke division, and weaken our democracy," she said during her opening remarks, reported CNN.

Haugen, 37, a former product manager on Facebook's civic misinformation team, said that effective regulation of Facebook would need to start with transparency, including allowing "full access to data for research not directed by Facebook."

She further said: "The company's leadership knows how to make Facebook and Instagram safer but won't make the necessary changes because they have put their astronomical profits before people. Congressional action is needed. They won't solve this crisis without your help."

According to CNN, Haugen's identity as the Facebook whistleblower was revealed on "60 Minutes" on Sunday night. She previously shared a series of documents with regulators and the Wall Street Journal, which published a multi-part investigation showing that Facebook was aware of problems with its apps, including the negative effects of misinformation and the harm caused by Instagram, especially to young girls.

"When we realized tobacco companies were hiding the harms it caused, the government took action," she said in her opening remarks. "When we figured out cars were safer with seat belts, the government took action. And today, the government is taking action against companies that hid evidence on opioids. I implore you to do the same here."

Following the hearing, Facebook issued a statement attempting to discredit Haugen. "Today, a Senate Commerce subcommittee held a hearing with a former product manager at Facebook who worked for the company for less than two years, had no direct reports, never attended a decision-point meeting with C-level executives -- and testified more than six times to not working on the subject matter in question," the statement, tweeted by spokesperson Andy Stone, read. "We don't agree with her characterization of the many issues she testified about. Despite all this, we agree on one thing; it's time to begin to create standard rules for the internet." CNN reported.

Yesterday, a site that monitors reports of outages across the internet, Downdetector, said the Facebook service outage is the largest it has ever seen.

The company said in a post on Monday, "The largest outage we've ever seen on Downdetector with over 10.6 million problem reports from all over the globe."

The US-led the world in the number of reports for disrupted service of more than 1.7 million, followed by Germany at 1.3 million reports and the Netherlands at 9,15,000 reports. Monday's outage had left several services under the Facebook corporate umbrella, including Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger, inaccessible.

( With inputs from ANI )

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