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Facebook Whistleblower Leaks Thousands of Pages of Incriminating Internal Docs

1143 points by sizzle 5y ago

donbox 5y ago
hmm, without facebook.com, I would surely would not have been able to catchup with my old schoolmates, with me having left the hometown 20 years ago.
binarymax 5y ago
Meta: Be warned that anyone who is anonymous and commenting on the validity of the whistleblower, may be speaking in the interests of facebook and spreading disinformation.
erehweb 5y ago
The link claims that thousands of documents were shared. Wonder if we will get a list of what these were at some point - perhaps just title if not the full docs.
mdoms 5y ago
Am I the only one who found the Facebook Files reporting very overwrought and stretched? There were some issues and red flags in there, but mostly it seemed... not that bad?
- Graffur 5y ago
  How do you see the files?
  - mdoms 5y ago
    "Facebook Files" was the project name Wall Street Journal gave to their flagship reporting on this story. I haven't seen the files unfortunately.
- fullshark 5y ago
  Appears to be the emerging consensus at least at hacker news.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
EDIT: I removed a misquote from this comment after another user pointed out my mistake. There do appear to be a few legitimate concerns worth investigating, but it’s starting to feel like the media has sensed that Facebook is the villain du jour and they’re throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks. These stories seem to dance around the subject of what exactly Facebook did, but instead focus on the existence of a whistleblower. If there was a story here, I feel like they’re working hard on overplaying their hand at the risk of losing the audience once the initial frenzy wears off. That’s fine for media companies who can move on to the next bogeyman, but it’s not going to help the underlying cause.
- paxys 5y ago
  > Facebook issued a lengthy statement from director of policy communications Lena Pietsch titled "Missing Facts from Tonight's 60 Minutes Segment." > She pointed to Facebook's investment to monitor for harmful content; disputed the way Facebook's own research on teenagers' mental health has been reported; and rejected the claim that the social network has furthered political polarization. You are quoting something Facebook used as a defense
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- aardvarkr 5y ago
  Did you actually read the article or are you just trying to create controversy? That quote comes from a Facebook spokesperson trying to push back against the negative attention. > Facebook issued a lengthy statement from director of policy communications Lena Pietsch titled "Missing Facts from Tonight's 60 Minutes Segment." > She pointed to Facebook's investment to monitor for harmful content; disputed the way Facebook's own research on teenagers' mental health has been reported; and rejected the claim that the social network has furthered political polarization. How can you say "If there was a story here, I feel like they’re working hard on overplaying their hand at the risk of losing the audience once the initial frenzy wears off." when you have clearly demonstrated that you didn't bother to read the story in the first place and just like to cherrypick quotes out of context to prove a point? EDIT: And now the OP has edited their post but still stands by their claim that this is a nothingburger, without evidence this time. For context, the OP originally quoted "She pointed to Facebook's investment to monitor for harmful content" out of context as evidence of something good that facebook did but this article is trying to trump up into something bad.
phantom_oracle 5y ago
Firstly, it is sad to say that HN is becoming more negative like the rest of the internet. On the front page there are more articles devoted to the ever-evolving shit-show of American-focused news issues. There are far less links to things that I THINK HN is more suited for: like BGP protocol or building your own ham radio. That aside, my theory about whistleblowing is that it is a counter-intuitive exercise that results in very little at the expense of orgs tightening their security policies. Case in point: Snowden and the NSA Leaks don't seem to happen after the first one. One or two small bills to "change a law" doesn't fix an endemic problem. Facebook will continue after this blip. They have enough money to spin the PR in their favor and to grease the hands of their political-dependents there in Washington.
- tantalor 5y ago
  > Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate > Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- Syonyk 5y ago
  Two of the front page articles right now are about BGP - one about exploring it, one about playing Battleship over it. That seems... relevant? But we all have to live in a world influenced by social media, Facebook is really the most overtly evil of them (What's Good for Zuck is Good for Zuck! seems to be their guiding principle lately - anything for more ZuckBucks), and as it comes out that they've known that what they're doing is evil, and continue doing it? This is relevant tech news. And, yes, I'm exceedingly "negative" about social media anymore. The downsides in terms of ripping apart society outweigh the upsides of making a lot of money for a few people.
- runawaybottle 5y ago
  It’s because that blockchain someone made is being used as national currency somewhere (and contributing needlessly to global energy consumption), and because that photo sharing site is causing body image issues, and that ad-tracker is building a digital trail of everything you do, and that ML algo is identifying protestors, and and and … We are not discussing the shit show, we are the shit show.
impostervt 5y ago
What are the potential legal ramifications for the whistleblower?
- CPLX 5y ago
  Seeing as how the actual mechanics of the leak were orchestrated by an attorney, and the documents were sent to an enforcement division of the Federal Government, it would be a pretty fair guess that they have considered it and are on solid legal ground.
  - PragmaticPulp 5y ago
    Are they operating pro bono? If not, they may simply take the case because it will generate a lot of work for them, and it’s likely that such a public case could attract plenty of donations to fund the cause. Having argued a high profile case against Facebook is a huge reputation boost for a lawyer.
    - CPLX 5y ago
      > Are they operating pro bono? They are a public interest non-profit: https://whistlebloweraid.org/vision/ https://whistlebloweraid.org/vision/
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  That’s a good question. Leaking internal company documents doesn’t automatically grant someone whistleblower protection. She appears to be trying an angle where she claims that Facebook’s activities have harmed shareholders in an attempt to capture some degree of whistleblower protection, but that’s a huge stretch given that she’s arguing they made choices in the interest of profits without violating any actual laws. At this point, I think her best chance is to hope that Facebook will simply try to minimize the legal issue to avoid making her into too much of a martyr.
  - Me1000 5y ago
    It's not really an "angle", she worked with a whistleblower protection organization and she specifically gave these documents to the SEC, filing 8 complaints with the regulatory organization. All of that communication is protected. I don't know what the legal implications for leaking to the press are, but that's where her exposure is.
ausbah 5y ago
why would you reveal yourself if you don't have guanareteed protection?
- jasondigitized 5y ago
  She went through the FTC which adds a layer of potential whistleblower protection.
- travoc 5y ago
  Facebook likely knew the identity of the leaker right away. There was little advantage to maintaining the illusion of anonymity at this point.
  - achow 5y ago
    Correct. She said that she began thinking about leaving messages for Facebook’s internal security team for when they inevitably reviewed her search activity. On May 17, shortly before 7 p.m., she logged on for the last time and typed her final message into Workplace’s search bar to try to explain her motives. “I don’t hate Facebook,” she wrote. “I love Facebook. I want to save it.” https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-whistleblower-frances-haugen-says-she-wants-to-fix-the-company-not-harm-it-11633304122 https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-whistleblower-frances-...
prvc 5y ago
What concrete information has been revealed that implicates Facebook in illegal behavior? How does the "whistleblower"'s stated desires wrt goverment-mandated moderation standards differ from those articulated by representatives of the company itself? Such a framework would shift liability away from the company, possibly reduce their moderation load, and create a significant barrier for entry for potential competitors.
- avisser 5y ago
  In the 60 minutes interview her lawyer cites part of Dodd-Frank that protects whistleblowers going to the SEC. Their position is that the documents are material to investors re:valuation and that Facebook was negligent by not providing it. https://youtu.be/_Lx5VmAdZSI?t=596 https://youtu.be/_Lx5VmAdZSI?t=596
  - jhawk28 5y ago
    The problem is that would cover pretty much anything.
    - gameswithgo 5y ago
      Why is that a problem?
    - nostrademons 5y ago
      That's the intent, not the problem.
    - TeMPOraL 5y ago
      As the famous Levine's quip goes, "everything is securities fraud". From first reading of the article, it seems to me she just wants to nail Facebook with SEC, with everything else being just noise to get media attention.
- travoc 5y ago
  The whistleblower is taking a huge legal risk here. I wonder if the Wall Street Journal has really explained the consequences to the leaker.
I_am_tiberius 5y ago
I assume not all of it concerns relevant information. Therefore I ask myself why not leaking only information relevant to the public?
shmatt 5y ago
There is something that doesn't sit right with me about the whistleblower. Yes, she is a data scientist which gives her many many extra points. But, she was a PM for 2 years in FAANG. Her actual scope of the what was going on in FB as a huge org, as she's trying to comment on (the "I want to fix FB" quotes from 60 minutes) Everyone I know who works in FAANG, FB specifically, and PMs even more specifically, really have little idea of whats going on in the bigger picture. They kind of understand their little piece of the puzzle, but even then things can get ambiguous sometimes (and this is intentional, as I understand the inner workings at FB) Bringing her in to the media and Congress as this star witness that understands exactly whats going on seems misleading. People from outside this world are taking her word like we are hearing from someone at the C-suite or an executive who has been with the company for 10+ years That, and she seems to falsely claim she is an officially titled co-founder of Hinge on her Linkedin
- 1024core 5y ago
  From her profile: > In June 2019, she joined Facebook. There, she handled democracy and misinformation issues, as well as working on counterespionage as part of the civic misinformation team, according to her personal website. So she's not just a random "PM" in Facebook; she was intimately involved in what she's talking about. Please stop trying to spread disinformation.
- intended 5y ago
  Are there any specific parts of her testimony that you disagree with? From what I have seen, everything she has said tracks correctly, and does not go outside her realm of knowledge. She has limited her focus very clearly, for example on FB prioritizing reshares vs a known increased risk of violence. So she is in perfect position say that FB has chosen to prioritize growth over user safety.
- walrus01 5y ago
  > Everyone I know who works in FAANG, FB specifically, and PMs even more specifically, really have little idea of whats going on in the bigger picture That's exactly the thing about the banality of evil, any individual person working on some small subsystem or component of something in a FAANG, to them it might not immediately be apparent that what they're doing is enabling the corrosion of democracy and discourse. And enabling the monetization of peoples' attention into endlessly scrolling social media feedback loops. It's the end result of all the work of hundreds, or thousands of 'engineers' and 'product managers' in facebook working together on their own projects, combined together in aggregate, that turn it into a monster. You can also see the same thing in hardware and software engineers that work on some small discrete component of some piece of equipment in the defense industry. They might not agree with the total product as it's used in the real world (precision US weapons sold to Saudi Arabia and deployed in Yemen, for instance). But all that one engineer sees is the small item or subsystem that is within their scope of work.
trompetenaccoun 5y ago
This story is on the current frontpage with 3 seperate threads, two even linking to the same outlet (NPR). When you go into the threads criticism of this call for greater government regulation of speech is met with personal attacks and other fallacious arguments. Might be just humans being overly excited humans, but this sure seems very organic.
- nanidin 5y ago
  My $0.02, but it seems like the moderation team (dang in particular) has been less active over the last 24 hours. Usually there are reminders in large threads to click the "more" button to see all comments, but there was no such comment on the huge "Facebook-owned sites were down" post yesterday. They usually also merge duplicates and add top level comments with links to the other conversations taking place on the same topic. The moderation team usually does a lot to reign in problem behavior, but there seems to have been a lot questionable comments making it through lately. I have also noticed a lot of comments by users with "throwaway" in their usernames - seems like a shift in who is using HN and how they are using it.
jasondigitized 5y ago
Now do the same for CNN, Fox News and every other sophisticated media company who have all created Skinner boxes to get more eyeballs. The entire system needs a hard examination.
- q1w2 5y ago
  I suspect the reaction from a lot of companies is going to be to lock down internal documents under a need-to-know security model.
  - throwaway6734 5y ago
    And greatly reduce their efficiency
  - amoshi 5y ago
    That's pretty much what happened after Snowden, everything is much more locked down, access is tightly controlled and employees are more closely monitored. That's why I'm glad he released as much as he did, any followup whistle-blower leak is bound to be much much harder.
    - cratermoon 5y ago
      That also happened somewhat under Sabanes-Oxley and HIPAA. Documents that might have once sat in an unlocked filing cabinet are now locked in vaults.
  - daniel-cussen 5y ago
    That helps the public good too.
  - colpabar 5y ago
    My tinfoil theory about the outage yesterday is that it was done on purpose, as a way to create an opportunity to "hide" as many internal documents as possible without anyone noticing.
lurquer 5y ago
A ‘whistleblower’ who claims FB isn’t censoring enough? Isn’t manipulating and curating political views enough? Gimme a break... This is like something you’d read in the Gulag Archipelago.
- kentonv 5y ago
  She is not arguing for censorship at all. She's actually arguing that content-based censorship doesn't work because the AI algorithms are so inaccurate. She is arguing against algorithmic content ranking, and in favor of chronological feeds, as well as other measures that do not attempt to judge the content itself.
- TheGigaChad 5y ago
  Idiot.
grouphugs 5y ago
once again people are not really understanding this issue. this isn't about security or products, it's about white men and their fascist institutions controlling technology for their own fascist gains once again, it was never about products, security, or customer satisfaction
kadabra9 5y ago
“Whistleblower” - with the heaviest use of air quotes.
woeirua 5y ago
I think a lot of people are choosing to ignore that a lot of companies have done things in the past that were not illegal at the time of action. However, those actions were later decided to be made illegal because the behavior was deemed to be antithetical to our values. For example, Standard Oil did not break any laws in its ruthless consolidation of the nascent oil industry. In fact, it exploited the law to allow it to grow into the monstrosity that it eventually became. In response, Congress passed the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1890 which subsequently prevented the actions that Standard Oil had used to consolidate the market. There should be no question, that what FB is doing here, while not illegal, is highly dubious ethically.
- hunterb123 5y ago
  To clarify, can you specify exactly what law you would like made? What do you want to be done exactly? I would rather take the stance of feed algorithms and moderation logs be PUBLICLY available. Transparency instead of censorship.
  - asdff 5y ago
    Treat addictive social media companies like addictive cigarette companies. Lets see some huge warning labels about how mentally harmful it is to continue scrolling on facebook right on the first result where its unavoidable to see. Lets tax the hell out of social media companies to generate local revenue just like sin taxes. It won't be a huge change but it will be a great starting point and will come with revenue that can fund potentially mental healthcare programs for people damaged by these companies.
    - mcguire 5y ago
      I'm not sure this would have the effect you want. You tax Facebook but allow it to operate however it wants. Facebook is then incentivized to double down on its algorithms---like tobacco companies using chemical and biological techniques to make cigarettes more addictive---in order to regain the lost profits.
PrinceRichard 5y ago
"Facebook does not moderate content in a way that I approve of" is a long way off from "incriminating"
siruncledrew 5y ago
I don't care about Facebook, and am not interested in using it, but after reading the spiral of consequences Facebook has been in, it made me think: 1. To all the governments that want to tighten more control on communication, this is great kindling to show people "we the government should further control tech for your own good". 2. You can hardly get the US gov to agree on anything, but when it's about hating each other as much in the digital world as in the physical world via a common source, everyone's at attention. 3. Facebook is so ill-equipped to handle most of the issues that were brought forth. The expectation that the gov/people places on Facebook =/= reality of what Facebook can deliver. Facebook is running around frantically trying to manage an existing mess of a switchboard, they are not going to pull a miracle.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  > 1. To all the governments that want to tighten more control on communication, this is great kindling to show people "we the government should further control tech for your own good". I'm genuinely shocked that the popular sentiment on HN leans toward more government intervention and control of internet communications. So many comments here are calling for more laws and regulation, but few people can even begin to elaborate what they want those laws to do. If laws are passed, they won't be targeted at a specific company, nor will they be limited to specific bad actors on Facebook. There is no magic law that makes all of the bad parts of the internet disappear without also having some chilling effects on the part of the internet that you actually like. If anything, large incumbents like Facebook tend to come out ahead of the smaller companies when onerous regulations are put in place.
  - itronitron 5y ago
    >> I'm genuinely shocked that the popular sentiment on HN leans toward more government intervention and control of internet communications I'm not seeing that as the popular sentiment here. I think we just want FB to stop algorithmically boosting stuff in order to boost engagement numbers and to also start applying the rules equally.
- lrem 5y ago
dionian 5y ago
The fact that the whistleblower has connections to the Democratic Party (donations, legal representation), and is calling for more censorship... makes me wonder about the possible ulterior motives
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
ozzythecat 5y ago
I don’t personally use FB and don’t have a very favorable view of their products. I would, however, like to see the same level scrutiny applied to the general American media, especially the news media. FB has come in and started eating their lunch. There’s a deeper problem here, and it feels more like the powers that he want to take down FB. I’m not denying any allegation made against FB, but why is it that Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, and Hollywood get a pass when they’ve been damaging America for much longer than FB has existed? If the government sees a problem and wants to get involved - great. But let’s hold an equal bar.
- philwelch 5y ago
  The elephant in the room here is the First Amendment. The government, legally, cannot do anything to censor "hate speech" or "misinformation" on CNN or Fox News. They also can't do anything to censor "hate speech" or "misinformation" on Facebook, but they can certainly harass Facebook into doing it for them.
  - n8cpdx 5y ago
    Not completely true. Historically mass media was regulated. Lying also isn't legally protected if it causes injury (fire in a crowded theater being the canonical example, libel another). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine
    - philwelch 5y ago
      > fire in a crowded theater being the canonical example That phrase comes from Schenck v. United States, where the Supreme Court ruled that the federal government could imprison an anti-war activist for disseminating pamphlets.
    - bhupy 5y ago
      > fire in a crowded theater being the canonical example https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-time-to-stop-using-the-fire-in-a-crowded-theater-quote/264449/ https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-tim...
ncr100 5y ago
As a technologist, to me this is technology being disruptive without sufficient control. In this case disruptive to human communication. And FB doesn't also have a comprehensive suite of human ethics sufficiently in their loop. Why did FB do this: She identified a disconnect between the FB Civic Engagement team recommendations and FB acting on those recommendations, in one of the 60 Minutes videos. She says people at FB aren't trying to be evil, however: > "... also detailed how she says Facebook quickly disbanded its civic integrity team — responsible for protecting the democratic process and tackling misinformation — after the 2020 U.S. election." What ethics does FB corporation stand for, factually? [Spare the cynical "profit" ethic - other than that.] Is it "connecting people for .. " some reason? Today's hearings indicate an evolution to COPPA, at the least, may be a legal outcome: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvYB9_PR3sQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvYB9_PR3sQ
- darkwizard42 5y ago
  I mean disbanding the civic integrity team after a huge civic event seems reasonable? It could have been the team was more of a task force and comes together when large events occur. We don't really have any/much insight into how they spun up a war room for the 2020 election. A related situation might be how Lyft/Uber have massive war rooms and special ops teams to handle Halloween and New Years (massive heavy traffic events on these platforms). There is a special ops team and several marketplace teams that get pulled in, but they get "disbanded" and go work on more standard things after
  - shkkmo 5y ago
    Unless that civic event had significant unresolved elements such as the failure of the sitting president to actually concede the election but rather to contest it. And it's not like Facebook isn't a global company that deals with a more or less constant deluge of important elections in many countries.
nradov 5y ago
The title here doesn't match the article headline. The documents make Facebook look bad but so far I haven't seen anything incriminating, in the sense of violating a US Federal criminal statute. Are there credible allegations of something like securities fraud or wire fraud here? Note that there is no generally no law against disseminating incorrect or "harmful" information.
- IshKebab 5y ago
  Yeah this appears to just be some embarrassing things but nothing outright illegal or really even surprising. What company doesn't have embarrassing secrets they'd rather not be leaked? None that I've worked at anyway, and none of those were evil.
- slongfield 5y ago
  The section at the end -- "Haugen contacted state officials and the SEC" talks about the parts of the whistleblower documents that show that Facebook was misleading investors. That is criminal under current US law. I think people are more mad about the other things in the documents--most people are more sympathetic to harm done to kids' mental health than to investors' bottom line, but lying to investors is the one that's illegal.
  - ENOTTY 5y ago
    This might fall under Matt Levine's theory that "everything is securities fraud"
- elliekelly 5y ago
  They’ve lied to the public and (if the lies were material to investors) that’s securities fraud.
  - cratermoon 5y ago
    Which says more about the emasculated regulatory regime in the US than anything else. There are no penalties, or none of any real meaning, for causing to harm to consumers or the community, but violating the holy tenet of maximizing shareholder value is almost a cardinal sin.
kentonv 5y ago
I highly recommend watching the Senate hearing from today, and I'm a person who normally can't stand these things. This was totally different from any other hearing I've seen -- little grandstanding, no partisan bickering, no evading of questions. Most of the Senators seemed genuinely interested in what Frances had to say, and she gave meaningful insights backed by real data. A lot of what she's saying is stuff that has been generally known in the tech industry for some time -- that algorithmic content ranking amplifies division and outrage. But the detail she gave about actual research quantifying it goes way deeper than I think most of us were aware of. https://www.commerce.senate.gov/2021/10/protecting%20kids%20online:%20testimony%20from%20a%20facebook%20whistleblower https://www.commerce.senate.gov/2021/10/protecting%20kids%20...
- zestyping 5y ago
  Strongly agree. She is doing this in a way that no one has really done (certainly not at this level of skill) before: explaining the systemic issues, giving clear and direct answers, keeping the conflict away from the personal, and most of all delivering criticism with empathy and compassion for all involved.
  - htrp 5y ago
    Thats future Senator Francds Haugen to you
- sillysaurusx 5y ago
  Just wanted to thank you for the comment. You weren't kidding; everything she says seems data driven. I especially liked her observation (around ~1h) that FB can determine the real age of users by "working backwards" and doing cohort analyses.
dukeofdoom 5y ago
The government doesn't belong in the bedrooms of the nation, but somehow should decide which meme graphics two adults can share online. Lets Go Brandon.
intended 5y ago
A frustration is how often these discussions are America centric, and the whistleblower herself pointed out how little integrity work is done on most other languages - that integrity software is not even pushed to those regions. The specific example discussed was Ethiopia where facebook has integrity teams(?) for 2 out of 5 languages. However, its remiss to say this is just a FB thing. Want to work on hate detection in any complex region. The ease with which you can do hate speech detection in English (with all its caveats) pales in comparison to working on commonly shared content in other regions.
plandis 5y ago
If you don’t like Facebook just don’t use Facebook, WhatsApp, or Instagram. Don’t know why so many people here think parents and adults are not capable of regulating themselves and their kids. It’s honestly condescending to think you know better than your fellow citizens if you’re arguing for government intervention.
- fighterpilot 5y ago
  The problem is roundabout externalities. If you're a genocide victim in Myanmar, whether or not you stayed off FB is irrelevant. The other problem is informed consent. Kids don't have the mental defences to avoid the dopamine trap. Whether parents allow the kids is beside the point. A parent can allow a kid to have sex but it's still illegal because the kid isn't capable of consenting.
- brap 5y ago
  I had to read through way too many comments to get to a sane one.
- dirkt 5y ago
  While I agree, and while I do that myself, the social pressure to use Facebook/WhatsApp/Instagram is immense. And it's worse for kids. I have to constantly explain to people why I don't use those, and they still keep trying to convince me that I should.
- 015a 5y ago
  If you don't like Oxycontin, just don't use Oxycontin, Dilaudid, or Fentanyl. Don't know why so many people here think adults are not capable of regulating themselves.
  - mr_toad 5y ago
    Chemical dependency is a real thing with serious medical effects. Severe cases of withdrawal can actually be fatal.
    - 5y ago
vincent_waters 5y ago
What is "incriminating"? It is legal to remove protected speech, but it's not illegal to not remove it. COVID and election "misinformation" are, for the most part, protected. In fact, the actual headline is just "Facebook's new whistleblower is renewing scrutiny of the social media giant," with no mention of incrimination. The Hacker News version of the headline is misinformation.
- sizzle 5y ago
  She leaked info to the SEC about Facebook materially misleading shareholders and investors, which is illegal. Reread the full article till the end.
marstall 5y ago
Time to talk about Section 230 again?
tomcam 5y ago
Can anyone provide links to the actual documents?
endisneigh 5y ago
My issue is that the government shouldn't allow companies - especially tech companies - to become so big to begin with. There are ways the government can begin to minimize the growth of said companies. There can be taxes based on the amount of MAU, strictly prohibit any acquisition of other "social media" after a certain size, etc. In my opinion Facebook should be forced to break up WhatsApp, Insta, etc. In addition, the new broken up Facebook organizations should be taxed heavily (call it a network effect tax, that's progressive and highly de-incentivizes being so huge). Alternatively, the government could just deem certain internet activity "marked" and make it so all "marked" internet activity to require payment. This would include pornography, social media, etc. That being said the challenge would be creating a reasonable definition of what "marked" includes.
- eightysixfour 5y ago
  So you would tax HN based on the number of monthly active users it has?
utunbu 5y ago
Not surprised after seeing "aliens are our ancestors" ads on FB for a while.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
softwarebeware 5y ago
Let's assume Facebook does invest into policing their platform to the extent necessary for it to not result in political consequences ("misinformation and disinformation"). There's still the rest of the internet. There's still all the open-source tools available that can be used for good or ill. The problem is much larger than Facebook.
yumraj 5y ago
I think FB is having its MySpace moment. From what I remember, right around the time FB was picking up, MySpace was facing a lot of scrutiny especially around predators preying on children, which was one of the main, if not the only, reason for MySpace's downfall. The time is ripe for a competitor to enter this space.
- throw_m239339 5y ago
  > I think FB is having its MySpace moment. No. Beyond USA, Facebook and its app ecosystem is used by people all over the world as a way to do business, this is especially true in developed country, people sell goods via Facebook, adversative and communicate to their customers via Facebook... MySpace never had as much reach and was never central to anybody's life. For many people all over the planet, Facebook and Whatsapp are the only apps they use. A lot of people on HN, because they are westerners, completely fail to understand that and only see how Facebook "fails to moderate the speech they don't agree with". > MySpace was facing a lot of scrutiny especially around predators preying on children, which was one of the main, if not the only, reason for MySpace's downfall. No, Myspace failed mostly for racist reasons, ironically, when young white educated people left Myspace for Facebook when the latter was deemed, and I quote, "less ghetto".
grappler 5y ago
The headline on this hacker news entry says "Incriminating". I didn't find that word anywhere in the linked npr article. Is what has been leaked in fact incriminating?
- iakh 5y ago
  >...allegations involve the difference between what Facebook knew about its platform and what it said publicly. He said misleading investors is a crime under U.S. securities law.
- sizzle 5y ago
  yes, she posits that Facebook materially misled investors and shareholders (illegal in the US) and shared it with the SEC under whistleblower protections.
kjgkjhfkjf 5y ago
I'm not outraged or surprised by the revelations. Everyone knows there is toxicity on Facebook and other social media products. Social media is sometimes toxic because people are sometimes toxic. Moreover, people are drawn to toxicity because it is grotesquely fascinating. This is also the case for movies, video games, and other media; much of it is anti-social and misleading. Condemning Facebook for the toxicity of some of its users is like condemning the manufacturers of mirrors because you don't like what you see in them. If you are appalled by society's propensity for producing and consuming toxicity, then consider directing your attention to shortcomings of our education and healthcare systems rather than a company that is simply providing a useful service to its users and value to its stockholders.
oort-cloud9 5y ago
She is a Deep State plant. People like her are there to reinforce the idea that we need more government control over business. She is not any kind of genuine whistleblower. It's all political theater.
lr4444lr 5y ago
Heaven forbid parents be held responsible for their kids' mental health. We saw this with rock 'n roll, video games, and marijuana. Your kid saw someone possibly wearing a more expensive outfit on social media? Scarred for life, right? Imposing stricter age verification to clamp down on trafficking and the like is perfectly reasonable, but this social media demonization is the latest moral panic, and I hope it dies down before Congress does something stupid.
betwixthewires 5y ago
Imagine unironically whistleblowing and stoking outrage that the censorship isn't enough. It is bad that the company knew that Instagram is harmful to teenagers' mental health and still marketed to them anyway. But "Facebook doesn't do enough to stop the spread of misinformation" is the most ridiculous narrative on something like this I've ever heard, and honestly I'm not surprised such a narrative got a 60 minutes special. The problems I have with Facebook are the real problems, like how it is designed to get people addicted and steal their lives from them, how Instagram is designed to instill envy so as to maximize use. These are real problems, bad problems. "Facebook isn't doing enough to prevent vaccine hesitancy" is not on anyone's radar that seriously cares about the effect Facebook is having on our societies, the only people hammering on this narrative are misdirecting at best, working a propagandistic angle most likely.
- bestcoder69 5y ago
  Anecdotally, all of the people I know who are addicted to FB (and they were before COVID) are also all anti-vax.
  - TheFreim 5y ago
    Always interesting how anecdotes go since most "anti-vax" people I know despise Facebook and other large social media platforms.
  - betwixthewires 5y ago
    For me it ranges. Some people are opposed to the covid vaccine mandate, some people don't want it for themselves, some people (I think only one or two) are anti vax types, some have it but don't think others should have to and some think you're evil if you disagree that everyone should have to. Precisely what information people internalize on Facebook isn't the common thread there, the common thread is that it consumes their social life and has a near monopoly on their information availability and therefore worldview. Facebook's problems go beyond what information is available on it.
m0zg 5y ago
Not to defend FB, but could we please dispense with the notion that she's an actual "whistleblower" at this point? She retained an ultra expensive law firm (same lawyer as in Ukraine-gate), a PR firm, got 60 minutes interview, got verified on twitter within 2 days, got a congressional hearing within a week, and is currently organizing a PR tour in Europe. It's pretty clear this is being funded and directed externally, in a coordinated fashion, in an attempt to ensure Zuck's full compliance ahead of the midterms, without which they are going to lose. Greenwald wrote about this on his Substack earlier today: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/democrats-and-media-do-not-want-to https://greenwald.substack.com/p/democrats-and-media-do-not-... ShareBlue shills are out in full force: first downvote within half a second, a personal record.
duud 5y ago
Frances Haugen stands to earn hundreds of millions to billions of dollars from the SEC whistleblower award. That seems relevant to the conversation when she's accusing FB of prioritizing profit over the public good. What are her priorities? In terms of teens' mental health personally I feel that school affected me more negatively than social media. I would be surprised if the majority of those who responded to the surveys didn't feel the same. It seems the likely result (if any) of all this will be to further entrench FB by making onerous regulations that only they can afford to comply with.
zelphirkalt 5y ago
Text only link: https://text.npr.org/1042921981 https://text.npr.org/1042921981
khazhoux 5y ago
I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that all successful online sites are damaging to mental health, and have destroyed our collective attention spans, if nothing else. What sets FB apart is simply that it holds the top spot. Cut off FB's dopamine dispenser, and people will just rush to the next one over. And so on and so forth. Even Hacker News... I refresh front page several times a day, looking for another hour I can throw away in my short life, making comments like this that I will then check every hour to see how many upvotes I got from total strangers.
- Valakas_ 5y ago
  Our brain was not made for the current world we live in. And companies are ruthless in exploiting it. We were made to feel this dopamine of approval from our few tribe members, who we would spend all our lives with until we would die in battle, or hunting or from some disease. We live in such a farfetched environment, most people don't realise how much this affects us. We're striving for the same things that in a hunter-gatherer context would make us happy. Now they don't. We are not meant to be surrounded by strangers, we're not meant to have approval dopamine hits from them and from thousands of them. Our brain must even have trouble understanding what that is. We're not meant to go to some magical device to find a partner to spend the rest of the life with while in the process discarding other strangers, (...)
NoblePublius 5y ago
Imagine planting your own leak to claim you don’t censor enough to justify your plans to censor more.
deleted 5y ago
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meowface 5y ago
I'd like it if he at least addressed the real criticisms face-on instead of at a glance: >The argument that we deliberately push content that makes people angry for profit is deeply illogical. We make money from ads, and advertisers consistently tell us they don't want their ads next to harmful or angry content. And I don't know any tech company that sets out to build products that make people angry or depressed. The moral, business and product incentives all point in the opposite direction. The actual argument is that companies like Facebook make money by increasing user engagement and that polarizing and outrage-inducing content is one way to effectively increase engagement (be it deliberate or recommender algorithms simply discovering on their own that this kind of content is effective for engagement). He also glides over the issue of incentives and the algorithmic aspect. Simply saying "no tech company sets out to make people angry or depressed" is a truism that has no bearing on the argument. Of course their end goal isn't to make people angry or depressed. But is it an instrumental goal? Is it an unintended consequence that they nevertheless find useful, or at least find it too profitable and difficult invest 100% of their effort into mitigating it when it happens? This is the kind of vague, wishy-washy, feel-good politics/CEO-speak that everyone hates. It's inauthentic and calculated. Have a genuine, honest, PR/lawyer handler-free discussion about this in public and then maybe a few people can at least try to throw your behemoth of a quasi-nation-state a tiny bit of the benefit of the doubt. With this kind of defensive, political approach, you'll do nothing but lose even more of the sympathy you're already so bereft of.
andreyk 5y ago
For anyone like me who actually likes keeping up with friends / signing up to groups and events on FB, check this FB alternative out: https://mewe.com/myworld https://mewe.com/myworld The subscription based revenue model by itself makes it hugely different from FB and unlikely to evolve similarly. And while there are of course network effects etc. , this one seems surprisingly large already, so it might just have a chance...
BoHerfVIJrEsq 5y ago
Please don't call this person a whistleblower. They're working with the MSM to concoct a story about the need for more censorship.
tehjoker 5y ago
This seems to be a semi-comprehensive discussion of the findings: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-facebook-files-11631713039 https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-facebook-files-11631713039
danrocks 5y ago
I am very conflicted about this situation. On one hand, I recognize that Facebook may be a sort of anger multiplier when people scroll only through content that reconfirms their biases and buries said people deeper into their "truth bubbles". I get it. On the other hand, the two main pillars of this story: "won't somebody think of the children?" and "the democracy at risk" have been used to justify authoritarian measures all over the world. I do informal surveys of election news in some countries and often find that "the democracy is at risk" really means "people will elect somebody I don't like". China has recently banned effeminate men from appearing on TV primarily due to a concern that "Chinese boys' masculinity was under attack". I don't know this person and her politics, so I will not make judgments yet. I'd be disappointed if she is revealed to be an aspiring politician or one of those people who think every company they work at needs to follow their politics and moral compass. Edit: I have visited her Twitter page and frankly was a bit disgusted. It looks like a corporate page readying to spring to a world of newfound fame through speaking gigs and book deals.
- asdff 5y ago
  It goes far beyond electing people you don't like and to leave it at that is either brutally ignorant or willfully ignorant. thanks to facebook you have people refusing vaccinations and injesting horse dewormer. in the before times that sort of behavior would be relegated to those crazy few who would read tabloid rags, now we have police and fire departments who are unable to convince their first responders to get vaccinated.
fuzzfactor 5y ago
>Facebook Whistleblower Leaks Thousands of Pages Ruh-roh!
ogma 5y ago
What better way to shout into the void than posting on HN, a website that can't load more than one top-level comment on a page!
marsven_422 5y ago
Obviously planted whistleblower is obvious.
clarge1120 5y ago
FB was not censoring enough harmful information and users, so now they have to really censor harmful information and users. I suspect this will be downvoted into oblivion, but this just seems fishy and convenient.
nix23 5y ago
"Whistleblower" more like a Plant. BTW: Mark where are your "i give 99% of my wealth to a good thing?"
bicepjai 5y ago
I read a line in the NYT article that makes me judge all software engineers at FB ~~~~“She didn’t know how basic stacks worked,” wrote one Facebook engineer, referring to a term used by the engineering team to describe how data is structured in computer programming. He said all of her testimony should be disqualified.~~~~ https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/10/technology/facebook-whistleblower-employees.html?referringSource=articleShare https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/10/technology/facebook-whist...

1143 points by sizzle 5y ago

hmm, without facebook.com, I would surely would not have been able to catchup with my old schoolmates, with me having left the hometown 20 years ago.

binarymax 5y ago

Meta: Be warned that anyone who is anonymous and commenting on the validity of the whistleblower, may be speaking in the interests of facebook and spreading disinformation.

erehweb 5y ago

The link claims that thousands of documents were shared. Wonder if we will get a list of what these were at some point - perhaps just title if not the full docs.

mdoms 5y ago

Am I the only one who found the Facebook Files reporting very overwrought and stretched? There were some issues and red flags in there, but mostly it seemed... not that bad?

Graffur 5y ago
How do you see the files?
- mdoms 5y ago
  "Facebook Files" was the project name Wall Street Journal gave to their flagship reporting on this story. I haven't seen the files unfortunately.
fullshark 5y ago
Appears to be the emerging consensus at least at hacker news.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

EDIT: I removed a misquote from this comment after another user pointed out my mistake. There do appear to be a few legitimate concerns worth investigating, but it’s starting to feel like the media has sensed that Facebook is the villain du jour and they’re throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks. These stories seem to dance around the subject of what exactly Facebook did, but instead focus on the existence of a whistleblower. If there was a story here, I feel like they’re working hard on overplaying their hand at the risk of losing the audience once the initial frenzy wears off. That’s fine for media companies who can move on to the next bogeyman, but it’s not going to help the underlying cause.

paxys 5y ago
> Facebook issued a lengthy statement from director of policy communications Lena Pietsch titled "Missing Facts from Tonight's 60 Minutes Segment." > She pointed to Facebook's investment to monitor for harmful content; disputed the way Facebook's own research on teenagers' mental health has been reported; and rejected the claim that the social network has furthered political polarization. You are quoting something Facebook used as a defense
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
aardvarkr 5y ago
Did you actually read the article or are you just trying to create controversy? That quote comes from a Facebook spokesperson trying to push back against the negative attention. > Facebook issued a lengthy statement from director of policy communications Lena Pietsch titled "Missing Facts from Tonight's 60 Minutes Segment." > She pointed to Facebook's investment to monitor for harmful content; disputed the way Facebook's own research on teenagers' mental health has been reported; and rejected the claim that the social network has furthered political polarization. How can you say "If there was a story here, I feel like they’re working hard on overplaying their hand at the risk of losing the audience once the initial frenzy wears off." when you have clearly demonstrated that you didn't bother to read the story in the first place and just like to cherrypick quotes out of context to prove a point? EDIT: And now the OP has edited their post but still stands by their claim that this is a nothingburger, without evidence this time. For context, the OP originally quoted "She pointed to Facebook's investment to monitor for harmful content" out of context as evidence of something good that facebook did but this article is trying to trump up into something bad.

phantom_oracle 5y ago

Firstly, it is sad to say that HN is becoming more negative like the rest of the internet. On the front page there are more articles devoted to the ever-evolving shit-show of American-focused news issues. There are far less links to things that I THINK HN is more suited for: like BGP protocol or building your own ham radio. That aside, my theory about whistleblowing is that it is a counter-intuitive exercise that results in very little at the expense of orgs tightening their security policies. Case in point: Snowden and the NSA Leaks don't seem to happen after the first one. One or two small bills to "change a law" doesn't fix an endemic problem. Facebook will continue after this blip. They have enough money to spin the PR in their favor and to grease the hands of their political-dependents there in Washington.

tantalor 5y ago
> Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate > Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Syonyk 5y ago
Two of the front page articles right now are about BGP - one about exploring it, one about playing Battleship over it. That seems... relevant? But we all have to live in a world influenced by social media, Facebook is really the most overtly evil of them (What's Good for Zuck is Good for Zuck! seems to be their guiding principle lately - anything for more ZuckBucks), and as it comes out that they've known that what they're doing is evil, and continue doing it? This is relevant tech news. And, yes, I'm exceedingly "negative" about social media anymore. The downsides in terms of ripping apart society outweigh the upsides of making a lot of money for a few people.
runawaybottle 5y ago
It’s because that blockchain someone made is being used as national currency somewhere (and contributing needlessly to global energy consumption), and because that photo sharing site is causing body image issues, and that ad-tracker is building a digital trail of everything you do, and that ML algo is identifying protestors, and and and … We are not discussing the shit show, we are the shit show.

impostervt 5y ago

What are the potential legal ramifications for the whistleblower?

CPLX 5y ago
Seeing as how the actual mechanics of the leak were orchestrated by an attorney, and the documents were sent to an enforcement division of the Federal Government, it would be a pretty fair guess that they have considered it and are on solid legal ground.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  Are they operating pro bono? If not, they may simply take the case because it will generate a lot of work for them, and it’s likely that such a public case could attract plenty of donations to fund the cause. Having argued a high profile case against Facebook is a huge reputation boost for a lawyer.
  - CPLX 5y ago
    > Are they operating pro bono? They are a public interest non-profit: https://whistlebloweraid.org/vision/ https://whistlebloweraid.org/vision/
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
That’s a good question. Leaking internal company documents doesn’t automatically grant someone whistleblower protection. She appears to be trying an angle where she claims that Facebook’s activities have harmed shareholders in an attempt to capture some degree of whistleblower protection, but that’s a huge stretch given that she’s arguing they made choices in the interest of profits without violating any actual laws. At this point, I think her best chance is to hope that Facebook will simply try to minimize the legal issue to avoid making her into too much of a martyr.
- Me1000 5y ago
  It's not really an "angle", she worked with a whistleblower protection organization and she specifically gave these documents to the SEC, filing 8 complaints with the regulatory organization. All of that communication is protected. I don't know what the legal implications for leaking to the press are, but that's where her exposure is.

ausbah 5y ago

why would you reveal yourself if you don't have guanareteed protection?

jasondigitized 5y ago
She went through the FTC which adds a layer of potential whistleblower protection.
travoc 5y ago
Facebook likely knew the identity of the leaker right away. There was little advantage to maintaining the illusion of anonymity at this point.
- achow 5y ago
  Correct. She said that she began thinking about leaving messages for Facebook’s internal security team for when they inevitably reviewed her search activity. On May 17, shortly before 7 p.m., she logged on for the last time and typed her final message into Workplace’s search bar to try to explain her motives. “I don’t hate Facebook,” she wrote. “I love Facebook. I want to save it.” https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-whistleblower-frances-haugen-says-she-wants-to-fix-the-company-not-harm-it-11633304122 https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-whistleblower-frances-...

prvc 5y ago

What concrete information has been revealed that implicates Facebook in illegal behavior? How does the "whistleblower"'s stated desires wrt goverment-mandated moderation standards differ from those articulated by representatives of the company itself? Such a framework would shift liability away from the company, possibly reduce their moderation load, and create a significant barrier for entry for potential competitors.

avisser 5y ago
In the 60 minutes interview her lawyer cites part of Dodd-Frank that protects whistleblowers going to the SEC. Their position is that the documents are material to investors re:valuation and that Facebook was negligent by not providing it. https://youtu.be/_Lx5VmAdZSI?t=596 https://youtu.be/_Lx5VmAdZSI?t=596
- jhawk28 5y ago
  The problem is that would cover pretty much anything.
  - gameswithgo 5y ago
    Why is that a problem?
  - nostrademons 5y ago
    That's the intent, not the problem.
  - TeMPOraL 5y ago
    As the famous Levine's quip goes, "everything is securities fraud". From first reading of the article, it seems to me she just wants to nail Facebook with SEC, with everything else being just noise to get media attention.
travoc 5y ago
The whistleblower is taking a huge legal risk here. I wonder if the Wall Street Journal has really explained the consequences to the leaker.

I_am_tiberius 5y ago

I assume not all of it concerns relevant information. Therefore I ask myself why not leaking only information relevant to the public?

shmatt 5y ago

There is something that doesn't sit right with me about the whistleblower. Yes, she is a data scientist which gives her many many extra points. But, she was a PM for 2 years in FAANG. Her actual scope of the what was going on in FB as a huge org, as she's trying to comment on (the "I want to fix FB" quotes from 60 minutes) Everyone I know who works in FAANG, FB specifically, and PMs even more specifically, really have little idea of whats going on in the bigger picture. They kind of understand their little piece of the puzzle, but even then things can get ambiguous sometimes (and this is intentional, as I understand the inner workings at FB) Bringing her in to the media and Congress as this star witness that understands exactly whats going on seems misleading. People from outside this world are taking her word like we are hearing from someone at the C-suite or an executive who has been with the company for 10+ years That, and she seems to falsely claim she is an officially titled co-founder of Hinge on her Linkedin

1024core 5y ago
From her profile: > In June 2019, she joined Facebook. There, she handled democracy and misinformation issues, as well as working on counterespionage as part of the civic misinformation team, according to her personal website. So she's not just a random "PM" in Facebook; she was intimately involved in what she's talking about. Please stop trying to spread disinformation.
intended 5y ago
Are there any specific parts of her testimony that you disagree with? From what I have seen, everything she has said tracks correctly, and does not go outside her realm of knowledge. She has limited her focus very clearly, for example on FB prioritizing reshares vs a known increased risk of violence. So she is in perfect position say that FB has chosen to prioritize growth over user safety.
walrus01 5y ago
> Everyone I know who works in FAANG, FB specifically, and PMs even more specifically, really have little idea of whats going on in the bigger picture That's exactly the thing about the banality of evil, any individual person working on some small subsystem or component of something in a FAANG, to them it might not immediately be apparent that what they're doing is enabling the corrosion of democracy and discourse. And enabling the monetization of peoples' attention into endlessly scrolling social media feedback loops. It's the end result of all the work of hundreds, or thousands of 'engineers' and 'product managers' in facebook working together on their own projects, combined together in aggregate, that turn it into a monster. You can also see the same thing in hardware and software engineers that work on some small discrete component of some piece of equipment in the defense industry. They might not agree with the total product as it's used in the real world (precision US weapons sold to Saudi Arabia and deployed in Yemen, for instance). But all that one engineer sees is the small item or subsystem that is within their scope of work.

trompetenaccoun 5y ago

This story is on the current frontpage with 3 seperate threads, two even linking to the same outlet (NPR). When you go into the threads criticism of this call for greater government regulation of speech is met with personal attacks and other fallacious arguments. Might be just humans being overly excited humans, but this sure seems very organic.

nanidin 5y ago
My $0.02, but it seems like the moderation team (dang in particular) has been less active over the last 24 hours. Usually there are reminders in large threads to click the "more" button to see all comments, but there was no such comment on the huge "Facebook-owned sites were down" post yesterday. They usually also merge duplicates and add top level comments with links to the other conversations taking place on the same topic. The moderation team usually does a lot to reign in problem behavior, but there seems to have been a lot questionable comments making it through lately. I have also noticed a lot of comments by users with "throwaway" in their usernames - seems like a shift in who is using HN and how they are using it.

jasondigitized 5y ago

Now do the same for CNN, Fox News and every other sophisticated media company who have all created Skinner boxes to get more eyeballs. The entire system needs a hard examination.

q1w2 5y ago
I suspect the reaction from a lot of companies is going to be to lock down internal documents under a need-to-know security model.
- throwaway6734 5y ago
  And greatly reduce their efficiency
- amoshi 5y ago
  That's pretty much what happened after Snowden, everything is much more locked down, access is tightly controlled and employees are more closely monitored. That's why I'm glad he released as much as he did, any followup whistle-blower leak is bound to be much much harder.
  - cratermoon 5y ago
    That also happened somewhat under Sabanes-Oxley and HIPAA. Documents that might have once sat in an unlocked filing cabinet are now locked in vaults.
- daniel-cussen 5y ago
  That helps the public good too.
- colpabar 5y ago
  My tinfoil theory about the outage yesterday is that it was done on purpose, as a way to create an opportunity to "hide" as many internal documents as possible without anyone noticing.

lurquer 5y ago

A ‘whistleblower’ who claims FB isn’t censoring enough? Isn’t manipulating and curating political views enough? Gimme a break... This is like something you’d read in the Gulag Archipelago.

kentonv 5y ago
She is not arguing for censorship at all. She's actually arguing that content-based censorship doesn't work because the AI algorithms are so inaccurate. She is arguing against algorithmic content ranking, and in favor of chronological feeds, as well as other measures that do not attempt to judge the content itself.
TheGigaChad 5y ago
Idiot.

grouphugs 5y ago

once again people are not really understanding this issue. this isn't about security or products, it's about white men and their fascist institutions controlling technology for their own fascist gains once again, it was never about products, security, or customer satisfaction

kadabra9 5y ago

“Whistleblower” - with the heaviest use of air quotes.

woeirua 5y ago

I think a lot of people are choosing to ignore that a lot of companies have done things in the past that were not illegal at the time of action. However, those actions were later decided to be made illegal because the behavior was deemed to be antithetical to our values. For example, Standard Oil did not break any laws in its ruthless consolidation of the nascent oil industry. In fact, it exploited the law to allow it to grow into the monstrosity that it eventually became. In response, Congress passed the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1890 which subsequently prevented the actions that Standard Oil had used to consolidate the market. There should be no question, that what FB is doing here, while not illegal, is highly dubious ethically.

hunterb123 5y ago
To clarify, can you specify exactly what law you would like made? What do you want to be done exactly? I would rather take the stance of feed algorithms and moderation logs be PUBLICLY available. Transparency instead of censorship.
- asdff 5y ago
  Treat addictive social media companies like addictive cigarette companies. Lets see some huge warning labels about how mentally harmful it is to continue scrolling on facebook right on the first result where its unavoidable to see. Lets tax the hell out of social media companies to generate local revenue just like sin taxes. It won't be a huge change but it will be a great starting point and will come with revenue that can fund potentially mental healthcare programs for people damaged by these companies.
  - mcguire 5y ago
    I'm not sure this would have the effect you want. You tax Facebook but allow it to operate however it wants. Facebook is then incentivized to double down on its algorithms---like tobacco companies using chemical and biological techniques to make cigarettes more addictive---in order to regain the lost profits.

PrinceRichard 5y ago

"Facebook does not moderate content in a way that I approve of" is a long way off from "incriminating"

siruncledrew 5y ago

I don't care about Facebook, and am not interested in using it, but after reading the spiral of consequences Facebook has been in, it made me think: 1. To all the governments that want to tighten more control on communication, this is great kindling to show people "we the government should further control tech for your own good". 2. You can hardly get the US gov to agree on anything, but when it's about hating each other as much in the digital world as in the physical world via a common source, everyone's at attention. 3. Facebook is so ill-equipped to handle most of the issues that were brought forth. The expectation that the gov/people places on Facebook =/= reality of what Facebook can deliver. Facebook is running around frantically trying to manage an existing mess of a switchboard, they are not going to pull a miracle.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> 1. To all the governments that want to tighten more control on communication, this is great kindling to show people "we the government should further control tech for your own good". I'm genuinely shocked that the popular sentiment on HN leans toward more government intervention and control of internet communications. So many comments here are calling for more laws and regulation, but few people can even begin to elaborate what they want those laws to do. If laws are passed, they won't be targeted at a specific company, nor will they be limited to specific bad actors on Facebook. There is no magic law that makes all of the bad parts of the internet disappear without also having some chilling effects on the part of the internet that you actually like. If anything, large incumbents like Facebook tend to come out ahead of the smaller companies when onerous regulations are put in place.
- itronitron 5y ago
  >> I'm genuinely shocked that the popular sentiment on HN leans toward more government intervention and control of internet communications I'm not seeing that as the popular sentiment here. I think we just want FB to stop algorithmically boosting stuff in order to boost engagement numbers and to also start applying the rules equally.
lrem 5y ago

dionian 5y ago

The fact that the whistleblower has connections to the Democratic Party (donations, legal representation), and is calling for more censorship... makes me wonder about the possible ulterior motives

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

ozzythecat 5y ago

I don’t personally use FB and don’t have a very favorable view of their products. I would, however, like to see the same level scrutiny applied to the general American media, especially the news media. FB has come in and started eating their lunch. There’s a deeper problem here, and it feels more like the powers that he want to take down FB. I’m not denying any allegation made against FB, but why is it that Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, and Hollywood get a pass when they’ve been damaging America for much longer than FB has existed? If the government sees a problem and wants to get involved - great. But let’s hold an equal bar.

philwelch 5y ago
The elephant in the room here is the First Amendment. The government, legally, cannot do anything to censor "hate speech" or "misinformation" on CNN or Fox News. They also can't do anything to censor "hate speech" or "misinformation" on Facebook, but they can certainly harass Facebook into doing it for them.
- n8cpdx 5y ago
  Not completely true. Historically mass media was regulated. Lying also isn't legally protected if it causes injury (fire in a crowded theater being the canonical example, libel another). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine
  - philwelch 5y ago
    > fire in a crowded theater being the canonical example That phrase comes from Schenck v. United States, where the Supreme Court ruled that the federal government could imprison an anti-war activist for disseminating pamphlets.
  - bhupy 5y ago
    > fire in a crowded theater being the canonical example https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-time-to-stop-using-the-fire-in-a-crowded-theater-quote/264449/ https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-tim...

ncr100 5y ago

As a technologist, to me this is technology being disruptive without sufficient control. In this case disruptive to human communication. And FB doesn't also have a comprehensive suite of human ethics sufficiently in their loop. Why did FB do this: She identified a disconnect between the FB Civic Engagement team recommendations and FB acting on those recommendations, in one of the 60 Minutes videos. She says people at FB aren't trying to be evil, however: > "... also detailed how she says Facebook quickly disbanded its civic integrity team — responsible for protecting the democratic process and tackling misinformation — after the 2020 U.S. election." What ethics does FB corporation stand for, factually? [Spare the cynical "profit" ethic - other than that.] Is it "connecting people for .. " some reason? Today's hearings indicate an evolution to COPPA, at the least, may be a legal outcome: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvYB9_PR3sQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvYB9_PR3sQ

darkwizard42 5y ago
I mean disbanding the civic integrity team after a huge civic event seems reasonable? It could have been the team was more of a task force and comes together when large events occur. We don't really have any/much insight into how they spun up a war room for the 2020 election. A related situation might be how Lyft/Uber have massive war rooms and special ops teams to handle Halloween and New Years (massive heavy traffic events on these platforms). There is a special ops team and several marketplace teams that get pulled in, but they get "disbanded" and go work on more standard things after
- shkkmo 5y ago
  Unless that civic event had significant unresolved elements such as the failure of the sitting president to actually concede the election but rather to contest it. And it's not like Facebook isn't a global company that deals with a more or less constant deluge of important elections in many countries.

nradov 5y ago

The title here doesn't match the article headline. The documents make Facebook look bad but so far I haven't seen anything incriminating, in the sense of violating a US Federal criminal statute. Are there credible allegations of something like securities fraud or wire fraud here? Note that there is no generally no law against disseminating incorrect or "harmful" information.

IshKebab 5y ago
Yeah this appears to just be some embarrassing things but nothing outright illegal or really even surprising. What company doesn't have embarrassing secrets they'd rather not be leaked? None that I've worked at anyway, and none of those were evil.
slongfield 5y ago
The section at the end -- "Haugen contacted state officials and the SEC" talks about the parts of the whistleblower documents that show that Facebook was misleading investors. That is criminal under current US law. I think people are more mad about the other things in the documents--most people are more sympathetic to harm done to kids' mental health than to investors' bottom line, but lying to investors is the one that's illegal.
- ENOTTY 5y ago
  This might fall under Matt Levine's theory that "everything is securities fraud"
elliekelly 5y ago
They’ve lied to the public and (if the lies were material to investors) that’s securities fraud.
- cratermoon 5y ago
  Which says more about the emasculated regulatory regime in the US than anything else. There are no penalties, or none of any real meaning, for causing to harm to consumers or the community, but violating the holy tenet of maximizing shareholder value is almost a cardinal sin.

kentonv 5y ago

I highly recommend watching the Senate hearing from today, and I'm a person who normally can't stand these things. This was totally different from any other hearing I've seen -- little grandstanding, no partisan bickering, no evading of questions. Most of the Senators seemed genuinely interested in what Frances had to say, and she gave meaningful insights backed by real data. A lot of what she's saying is stuff that has been generally known in the tech industry for some time -- that algorithmic content ranking amplifies division and outrage. But the detail she gave about actual research quantifying it goes way deeper than I think most of us were aware of. https://www.commerce.senate.gov/2021/10/protecting%20kids%20online:%20testimony%20from%20a%20facebook%20whistleblower https://www.commerce.senate.gov/2021/10/protecting%20kids%20...

zestyping 5y ago
Strongly agree. She is doing this in a way that no one has really done (certainly not at this level of skill) before: explaining the systemic issues, giving clear and direct answers, keeping the conflict away from the personal, and most of all delivering criticism with empathy and compassion for all involved.
- htrp 5y ago
  Thats future Senator Francds Haugen to you
sillysaurusx 5y ago
Just wanted to thank you for the comment. You weren't kidding; everything she says seems data driven. I especially liked her observation (around ~1h) that FB can determine the real age of users by "working backwards" and doing cohort analyses.

dukeofdoom 5y ago

The government doesn't belong in the bedrooms of the nation, but somehow should decide which meme graphics two adults can share online. Lets Go Brandon.

intended 5y ago

A frustration is how often these discussions are America centric, and the whistleblower herself pointed out how little integrity work is done on most other languages - that integrity software is not even pushed to those regions. The specific example discussed was Ethiopia where facebook has integrity teams(?) for 2 out of 5 languages. However, its remiss to say this is just a FB thing. Want to work on hate detection in any complex region. The ease with which you can do hate speech detection in English (with all its caveats) pales in comparison to working on commonly shared content in other regions.

plandis 5y ago

If you don’t like Facebook just don’t use Facebook, WhatsApp, or Instagram. Don’t know why so many people here think parents and adults are not capable of regulating themselves and their kids. It’s honestly condescending to think you know better than your fellow citizens if you’re arguing for government intervention.

fighterpilot 5y ago
The problem is roundabout externalities. If you're a genocide victim in Myanmar, whether or not you stayed off FB is irrelevant. The other problem is informed consent. Kids don't have the mental defences to avoid the dopamine trap. Whether parents allow the kids is beside the point. A parent can allow a kid to have sex but it's still illegal because the kid isn't capable of consenting.
brap 5y ago
I had to read through way too many comments to get to a sane one.
dirkt 5y ago
While I agree, and while I do that myself, the social pressure to use Facebook/WhatsApp/Instagram is immense. And it's worse for kids. I have to constantly explain to people why I don't use those, and they still keep trying to convince me that I should.
015a 5y ago
If you don't like Oxycontin, just don't use Oxycontin, Dilaudid, or Fentanyl. Don't know why so many people here think adults are not capable of regulating themselves.
- mr_toad 5y ago
  Chemical dependency is a real thing with serious medical effects. Severe cases of withdrawal can actually be fatal.
  - 5y ago

vincent_waters 5y ago

What is "incriminating"? It is legal to remove protected speech, but it's not illegal to not remove it. COVID and election "misinformation" are, for the most part, protected. In fact, the actual headline is just "Facebook's new whistleblower is renewing scrutiny of the social media giant," with no mention of incrimination. The Hacker News version of the headline is misinformation.

sizzle 5y ago
She leaked info to the SEC about Facebook materially misleading shareholders and investors, which is illegal. Reread the full article till the end.

marstall 5y ago

Time to talk about Section 230 again?

tomcam 5y ago

Can anyone provide links to the actual documents?

endisneigh 5y ago

My issue is that the government shouldn't allow companies - especially tech companies - to become so big to begin with. There are ways the government can begin to minimize the growth of said companies. There can be taxes based on the amount of MAU, strictly prohibit any acquisition of other "social media" after a certain size, etc. In my opinion Facebook should be forced to break up WhatsApp, Insta, etc. In addition, the new broken up Facebook organizations should be taxed heavily (call it a network effect tax, that's progressive and highly de-incentivizes being so huge). Alternatively, the government could just deem certain internet activity "marked" and make it so all "marked" internet activity to require payment. This would include pornography, social media, etc. That being said the challenge would be creating a reasonable definition of what "marked" includes.

eightysixfour 5y ago
So you would tax HN based on the number of monthly active users it has?

utunbu 5y ago

Not surprised after seeing "aliens are our ancestors" ads on FB for a while.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

softwarebeware 5y ago

Let's assume Facebook does invest into policing their platform to the extent necessary for it to not result in political consequences ("misinformation and disinformation"). There's still the rest of the internet. There's still all the open-source tools available that can be used for good or ill. The problem is much larger than Facebook.

yumraj 5y ago

I think FB is having its MySpace moment. From what I remember, right around the time FB was picking up, MySpace was facing a lot of scrutiny especially around predators preying on children, which was one of the main, if not the only, reason for MySpace's downfall. The time is ripe for a competitor to enter this space.

throw_m239339 5y ago
> I think FB is having its MySpace moment. No. Beyond USA, Facebook and its app ecosystem is used by people all over the world as a way to do business, this is especially true in developed country, people sell goods via Facebook, adversative and communicate to their customers via Facebook... MySpace never had as much reach and was never central to anybody's life. For many people all over the planet, Facebook and Whatsapp are the only apps they use. A lot of people on HN, because they are westerners, completely fail to understand that and only see how Facebook "fails to moderate the speech they don't agree with". > MySpace was facing a lot of scrutiny especially around predators preying on children, which was one of the main, if not the only, reason for MySpace's downfall. No, Myspace failed mostly for racist reasons, ironically, when young white educated people left Myspace for Facebook when the latter was deemed, and I quote, "less ghetto".

grappler 5y ago

The headline on this hacker news entry says "Incriminating". I didn't find that word anywhere in the linked npr article. Is what has been leaked in fact incriminating?

iakh 5y ago
>...allegations involve the difference between what Facebook knew about its platform and what it said publicly. He said misleading investors is a crime under U.S. securities law.
sizzle 5y ago
yes, she posits that Facebook materially misled investors and shareholders (illegal in the US) and shared it with the SEC under whistleblower protections.

kjgkjhfkjf 5y ago

I'm not outraged or surprised by the revelations. Everyone knows there is toxicity on Facebook and other social media products. Social media is sometimes toxic because people are sometimes toxic. Moreover, people are drawn to toxicity because it is grotesquely fascinating. This is also the case for movies, video games, and other media; much of it is anti-social and misleading. Condemning Facebook for the toxicity of some of its users is like condemning the manufacturers of mirrors because you don't like what you see in them. If you are appalled by society's propensity for producing and consuming toxicity, then consider directing your attention to shortcomings of our education and healthcare systems rather than a company that is simply providing a useful service to its users and value to its stockholders.

oort-cloud9 5y ago

She is a Deep State plant. People like her are there to reinforce the idea that we need more government control over business. She is not any kind of genuine whistleblower. It's all political theater.

lr4444lr 5y ago

Heaven forbid parents be held responsible for their kids' mental health. We saw this with rock 'n roll, video games, and marijuana. Your kid saw someone possibly wearing a more expensive outfit on social media? Scarred for life, right? Imposing stricter age verification to clamp down on trafficking and the like is perfectly reasonable, but this social media demonization is the latest moral panic, and I hope it dies down before Congress does something stupid.

betwixthewires 5y ago

Imagine unironically whistleblowing and stoking outrage that the censorship isn't enough. It is bad that the company knew that Instagram is harmful to teenagers' mental health and still marketed to them anyway. But "Facebook doesn't do enough to stop the spread of misinformation" is the most ridiculous narrative on something like this I've ever heard, and honestly I'm not surprised such a narrative got a 60 minutes special. The problems I have with Facebook are the real problems, like how it is designed to get people addicted and steal their lives from them, how Instagram is designed to instill envy so as to maximize use. These are real problems, bad problems. "Facebook isn't doing enough to prevent vaccine hesitancy" is not on anyone's radar that seriously cares about the effect Facebook is having on our societies, the only people hammering on this narrative are misdirecting at best, working a propagandistic angle most likely.

bestcoder69 5y ago
Anecdotally, all of the people I know who are addicted to FB (and they were before COVID) are also all anti-vax.
- TheFreim 5y ago
  Always interesting how anecdotes go since most "anti-vax" people I know despise Facebook and other large social media platforms.
- betwixthewires 5y ago
  For me it ranges. Some people are opposed to the covid vaccine mandate, some people don't want it for themselves, some people (I think only one or two) are anti vax types, some have it but don't think others should have to and some think you're evil if you disagree that everyone should have to. Precisely what information people internalize on Facebook isn't the common thread there, the common thread is that it consumes their social life and has a near monopoly on their information availability and therefore worldview. Facebook's problems go beyond what information is available on it.

m0zg 5y ago

Not to defend FB, but could we please dispense with the notion that she's an actual "whistleblower" at this point? She retained an ultra expensive law firm (same lawyer as in Ukraine-gate), a PR firm, got 60 minutes interview, got verified on twitter within 2 days, got a congressional hearing within a week, and is currently organizing a PR tour in Europe. It's pretty clear this is being funded and directed externally, in a coordinated fashion, in an attempt to ensure Zuck's full compliance ahead of the midterms, without which they are going to lose. Greenwald wrote about this on his Substack earlier today: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/democrats-and-media-do-not-want-to https://greenwald.substack.com/p/democrats-and-media-do-not-... ShareBlue shills are out in full force: first downvote within half a second, a personal record.

duud 5y ago

Frances Haugen stands to earn hundreds of millions to billions of dollars from the SEC whistleblower award. That seems relevant to the conversation when she's accusing FB of prioritizing profit over the public good. What are her priorities? In terms of teens' mental health personally I feel that school affected me more negatively than social media. I would be surprised if the majority of those who responded to the surveys didn't feel the same. It seems the likely result (if any) of all this will be to further entrench FB by making onerous regulations that only they can afford to comply with.

zelphirkalt 5y ago

Text only link: https://text.npr.org/1042921981 https://text.npr.org/1042921981

khazhoux 5y ago

I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that all successful online sites are damaging to mental health, and have destroyed our collective attention spans, if nothing else. What sets FB apart is simply that it holds the top spot. Cut off FB's dopamine dispenser, and people will just rush to the next one over. And so on and so forth. Even Hacker News... I refresh front page several times a day, looking for another hour I can throw away in my short life, making comments like this that I will then check every hour to see how many upvotes I got from total strangers.

Valakas_ 5y ago
Our brain was not made for the current world we live in. And companies are ruthless in exploiting it. We were made to feel this dopamine of approval from our few tribe members, who we would spend all our lives with until we would die in battle, or hunting or from some disease. We live in such a farfetched environment, most people don't realise how much this affects us. We're striving for the same things that in a hunter-gatherer context would make us happy. Now they don't. We are not meant to be surrounded by strangers, we're not meant to have approval dopamine hits from them and from thousands of them. Our brain must even have trouble understanding what that is. We're not meant to go to some magical device to find a partner to spend the rest of the life with while in the process discarding other strangers, (...)

NoblePublius 5y ago

Imagine planting your own leak to claim you don’t censor enough to justify your plans to censor more.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

meowface 5y ago

I'd like it if he at least addressed the real criticisms face-on instead of at a glance: >The argument that we deliberately push content that makes people angry for profit is deeply illogical. We make money from ads, and advertisers consistently tell us they don't want their ads next to harmful or angry content. And I don't know any tech company that sets out to build products that make people angry or depressed. The moral, business and product incentives all point in the opposite direction. The actual argument is that companies like Facebook make money by increasing user engagement and that polarizing and outrage-inducing content is one way to effectively increase engagement (be it deliberate or recommender algorithms simply discovering on their own that this kind of content is effective for engagement). He also glides over the issue of incentives and the algorithmic aspect. Simply saying "no tech company sets out to make people angry or depressed" is a truism that has no bearing on the argument. Of course their end goal isn't to make people angry or depressed. But is it an instrumental goal? Is it an unintended consequence that they nevertheless find useful, or at least find it too profitable and difficult invest 100% of their effort into mitigating it when it happens? This is the kind of vague, wishy-washy, feel-good politics/CEO-speak that everyone hates. It's inauthentic and calculated. Have a genuine, honest, PR/lawyer handler-free discussion about this in public and then maybe a few people can at least try to throw your behemoth of a quasi-nation-state a tiny bit of the benefit of the doubt. With this kind of defensive, political approach, you'll do nothing but lose even more of the sympathy you're already so bereft of.

andreyk 5y ago

For anyone like me who actually likes keeping up with friends / signing up to groups and events on FB, check this FB alternative out: https://mewe.com/myworld https://mewe.com/myworld The subscription based revenue model by itself makes it hugely different from FB and unlikely to evolve similarly. And while there are of course network effects etc. , this one seems surprisingly large already, so it might just have a chance...

BoHerfVIJrEsq 5y ago

Please don't call this person a whistleblower. They're working with the MSM to concoct a story about the need for more censorship.

tehjoker 5y ago

This seems to be a semi-comprehensive discussion of the findings: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-facebook-files-11631713039 https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-facebook-files-11631713039

danrocks 5y ago

I am very conflicted about this situation. On one hand, I recognize that Facebook may be a sort of anger multiplier when people scroll only through content that reconfirms their biases and buries said people deeper into their "truth bubbles". I get it. On the other hand, the two main pillars of this story: "won't somebody think of the children?" and "the democracy at risk" have been used to justify authoritarian measures all over the world. I do informal surveys of election news in some countries and often find that "the democracy is at risk" really means "people will elect somebody I don't like". China has recently banned effeminate men from appearing on TV primarily due to a concern that "Chinese boys' masculinity was under attack". I don't know this person and her politics, so I will not make judgments yet. I'd be disappointed if she is revealed to be an aspiring politician or one of those people who think every company they work at needs to follow their politics and moral compass. Edit: I have visited her Twitter page and frankly was a bit disgusted. It looks like a corporate page readying to spring to a world of newfound fame through speaking gigs and book deals.

asdff 5y ago
It goes far beyond electing people you don't like and to leave it at that is either brutally ignorant or willfully ignorant. thanks to facebook you have people refusing vaccinations and injesting horse dewormer. in the before times that sort of behavior would be relegated to those crazy few who would read tabloid rags, now we have police and fire departments who are unable to convince their first responders to get vaccinated.

fuzzfactor 5y ago

>Facebook Whistleblower Leaks Thousands of Pages Ruh-roh!

ogma 5y ago

What better way to shout into the void than posting on HN, a website that can't load more than one top-level comment on a page!

marsven_422 5y ago

Obviously planted whistleblower is obvious.

clarge1120 5y ago

FB was not censoring enough harmful information and users, so now they have to really censor harmful information and users. I suspect this will be downvoted into oblivion, but this just seems fishy and convenient.

nix23 5y ago

"Whistleblower" more like a Plant. BTW: Mark where are your "i give 99% of my wealth to a good thing?"

bicepjai 5y ago

I read a line in the NYT article that makes me judge all software engineers at FB ~~~~“She didn’t know how basic stacks worked,” wrote one Facebook engineer, referring to a term used by the engineering team to describe how data is structured in computer programming. He said all of her testimony should be disqualified.~~~~ https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/10/technology/facebook-whistleblower-employees.html?referringSource=articleShare https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/10/technology/facebook-whist...