Far-Left Facebook “whistleblower” Frances Haugen claims that Mark Zuckerberg “has been surrounded by people since he was 19 years old, who told him he was doing a great job,” and that the company, now known as Meta, cannot “recover” until he steps down as CEO.
Haugen told Bloomberg that Facebook made changes to its algorithm in 2018 in an attempt to trigger reactions from users, rather than simply keep them on the website. “The algorithm changes they made in 2018 to go from just trying to keep you on the site as long as possible, to trying to optimize for eliciting a reaction from you changed what content got amplified,” Haugen said.
“Whistleblower”Frances Haugen dishes on Facebook (Jim Watson/Getty)
(Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)
The whistleblower added that “extreme content” now gets the most distribution in “linguistically diverse” countries, which she says means that the world’s most fragile countries are using the most “dangerous version of Facebook.”
“The algorithm now says unless we can provoke a reaction from you, it’s not good,” Haugen said.
“And when you combine that bias in the algorithm, that extreme content gets the most distribution, with linguistically diverse places — the most fragile places on earth are often linguistically diverse,” she added. “That means they’re using the most dangerous version of Facebook — that gets weaponized in a context that leads to tragedy.”
Haugen went on to say that Facebook will not be able to recover unless Mark Zuckerberg steps down as CEO of Meta, the site’s parent company. “Mark has been surrounded by people since he was 19 years old, who told him he was doing a great job,” the alleged whistleblower said.
Haugen notes that Zuckerberg is “the only one who has the power” at Meta, “because the voting structure of Facebook is different than most corporations, and he holds 56 percent of the votes for the company.”
“No one but Mark Zuckerberg can control Facebook right now,” she said. “I don’t think the company can recover as long as he is the leader of it.”
Last year, Haugen left Facebook, taking tens of thousands of pages of documents with her. The documents showed that the social media giant knew it was harming users’ mental health, and instigating violence in countries like Ethiopia. The documents have since been published as the “Facebook Files.”
You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Facebook and Twitter at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.
