London Daily

Focus on the big picture.
Wednesday, Oct 01, 2025

‘Is Facebook evil?’ Big Tech whistleblower goes for high drama in anonymity-bashing UK testimony

‘Is Facebook evil?’ Big Tech whistleblower goes for high drama in anonymity-bashing UK testimony

Facebook is inherently "biased toward bad actors," whistleblower Frances Haugen warned the UK Parliament, blaming the platform for stoking unrest in various parts of the world and suggesting tighter outside control as solution.

Haugen placed the blame for violence in Myanmar and Ethiopia, as well as the January 6 riot at the US Capitol, squarely at Facebook's feet during a Monday hearing before the Parliament, arguing that such atrocities were merely "part of the opening chapters of a novel that is going to be horrific to read."

"Engagement-based ranking prioritizes and amplifies divisive, polarizing content," she said, claiming that Facebook could ease up on the division if it was willing to sacrifice a few dollars here and there. However, "Facebook is unwilling to give up those slivers for our safety," she declared – and the results of continuing down the platform's current path would be disastrous.

Denying her goal is to force further censorship on the already tightly-controlled platform, Haugen argued that serving up content from family and friends and requiring users to cut and paste “divisive content” instead of sharing with a single click could cut back on the sharing of “hateful” material.

“We are literally subsidizing hate,” Haugen insisted – equating promoting engagement with promoting hate – because “anger and hate are the easiest way to grow on Facebook.” Continuing, she claimed it was “substantially cheaper to run an angry hateful divisive ad than it is to run a compassionate, empathetic ad.”

Asked whether the platform was “making hate worse,” she agreed it was “unquestionably” doing just that – though neither she nor her interlocutor paused to define “hate” or provide context as to what “making it worse” might look like.

The inquiry took a notably moralizing pitch, with MP John Nicolson (SNP) taking the soapbox to declare, “Facebook is failing to prevent harm to children, it’s failing to present the spread of disinformation, it’s failing to prevent hate speech. It does have the power to deal with these issues, it’s just choosing not to, which makes me wonder if Facebook is just fundamentally evil.”

"Is Facebook evil?"


“I cannot see into the hearts of men,” Haugen responded. The company was full of “good people” being led to “bad actions,” with those willing to look the other way promoted more rapidly than those who complained, she insisted. In general, she argued that the supposedly devastating harms of Facebook were caused by negligence, rather than malevolence.


Rather than chase users away with censorship and further intrusion into their privacy, Haugen insisted, government regulation could “force Facebook back into a place where it was more pleasant to be on Facebook and that could be good for long-term growth of the company.”

While she acknowledged that about 60% of new accounts being opened on the platform were not made by real people, suggesting not only their fellow users but investors in the platform itself were being duped, she failed to explain how screening for such phony accounts could avoid intruding on the privacy of “real” users. Such duping, after all, is going on at no small scale, to hear her speak – CEO Mark Zuckerberg “has unilateral control of 3 billion people,” she told the Parliament.

Despite being good, conscientious people, Haugen continued, the Facebook employees were being corrupted by a system built on bad incentives, in which every penny of profit must be prioritized over the well-being of users for whom one wrong move could send them spiraling down a rabbit hole of extremism.

Facebook didn’t “intend” to send people down such holes or otherwise radicalize them, Haugen stressed, arguing the complexity of the algorithms was responsible for new users being sucked into extremist vortexes. However, she admitted the platform pushed users toward the most extreme version of their interests, since controversy gets clicks.

Haugen insisted the platform was “very cautious” about how it added new forms of “hate speech” into the platform’s compendium of offense, calling for an improvement on “content-based solutions” that took into account national variations of phrases in the same language, such as differences in slang between Scotland and the US.

However, she admitted Facebook focused most of its misinformation-fighting efforts on so-called “tier zero” countries like the US, Brazil, and India, leaving other countries like Pakistan, Myanmar and Ethiopia to their own devices – to what she suggested were disastrous and in some cases genocidal results. This is also after the company caught Israeli influence operators meddling with elections across Africa, Latin America and Asia, raising the question of whether certain countries were being permitted to get away with meddling more than others.

Ultimately, Haugen seemed to blame Facebook users for what happened to them, noting that the ads that got the most engagement – and were thus cheapest – were the most likely to be shared by users precisely because they appealed to feelings of hatred, anger and divisiveness. All Facebook had to do was align itself with the “public good” and not lie to the public, she argued. Barring that, “better oversight” was required, she said.

Haugen praised the UK for its efforts to rein in Facebook’s abuses and hinted that she was “a little excited” about the company’s movement into “augmented reality.”

“The danger of Facebook is not individuals saying bad things,” she claimed, “it is about the systems of amplification that disproportionately give individuals saying extreme polarizing things the largest megaphone in the room.”

Journalists who’d spent years trying to convince the world that Facebook was a menace to democracy felt vindicated, posting links to both Haugen’s testimony and the flood of documents she released.


However, not everyone was taken in by Haugen’s apparent contrition on the part of her employer. Journalist Glenn Greenwald reminded her growing fan-base that her well-heeled whistleblowing campaign was financed by Russiagate-loving billionaire Pierre Omidyar.


Omidyar funded Greenwald’s former employer, the Intercept, supposedly to make NSA Edward Snowden’s own whistleblowing documents available to the world. Over a decade later, just 5% of that material has been seen by the public.

Newsletter

Related Articles

0:00
0:00
Close
Trump Administration Launches “TrumpRx” Plan to Enable Direct Drug Sales at Deep Discounts
Trump Announces Intention to Impose 100 Percent Tariff on Foreign-Made Films
Altman Says GPT-5 Already Outpaces Him, Warns AI Could Automate 40% of Work
Singapore and Hong Kong Vie to Dominate Asia’s Rising Gold Trade
Trump Organization Teams with Saudi Developer on $1 Billion Trump Plaza in Jeddah
Manhattan Sees Surge in Office-to-Housing Conversions, Highest Since 2008
Switzerland and U.S. Issue Joint Assurance Against Currency Manipulation
Electronic Arts to Be Taken Private in Historic $55 Billion Buyout
Thomas Jacob Sanford Named as Suspect in Deadly Michigan Church Shooting and Arson
Russian Research Vessel 'Yantar' Tracked Mapping Europe’s Subsea Cables, Raising Security Alarms
New York Man Arrested After On-Air Confession to 2017 Parents’ Murders
U.S. Defense Chief Orders Sudden Summit of Hundreds of Generals and Admirals
Global Cruise Industry Posts Dramatic Comeback with 34.6 Million Passengers in 2024
Trump Claims FBI Planted 274 Agents at Capitol Riot, Citing Unverified Reports
India: Internet Suspended in Bareilly Amid Communal Clashes Between Muslims and Hindus
Supreme Court Extends Freeze on Nearly $5 Billion in U.S. Foreign Aid at Trump’s Request
Archaeologists Recover Statues and Temples from 2,000-Year-Old Sunken City off Alexandria
China Deploys 2,000 Workers to Spain to Build Major EV Battery Factory, Raising European Dependence
Speed Takes Over: How Drive-Through Coffee Chains Are Rewriting U.S. Coffee Culture
U.S. Demands Brussels Scrutinize Digital Rules to Prevent Bias Against American Tech
Ringo Starr Champions Enduring Beatles Legacy While Debuting Las Vegas Art Show
Private Equity’s Fundraising Surge Triggers Concern of European Market Shake-Out
Colombian President Petro Vows to Mobilize Volunteers for Gaza and Joins List of Fighters
FBI Removes Agents Who Kneeled at 2020 Protest, Citing Breach of Professional Conduct
Trump Alleges ‘Triple Sabotage’ at United Nations After Escalator and Teleprompter Failures
Shock in France: 5 Years in Prison for Former President Nicolas Sarkozy
Tokyo’s Jimbōchō Named World’s Coolest Neighbourhood for 2025
European Officials Fear Trump May Shift Blame for Ukraine War onto EU
BNP Paribas Abandons Ban on 'Controversial Weapons' Financing Amid Europe’s Defence Push
Typhoon Ragasa Leaves Trail of Destruction Across East Asia Before Making Landfall in China
The Personality Rights Challenge in India’s AI Era
Big Banks Rebuild in Hong Kong as Deal Volume Surges
Italy Considers Freezing Retirement Age at 67 to Avert Scheduled Hike
Italian City to Impose Tax on Visiting Dogs Starting in 2026
Arnault Denounces Proposed Wealth Tax as Threat to French Economy
Study Finds No Safe Level of Alcohol for Dementia Risk
Denmark Investigates Drone Incursion, Does Not Rule Out Russian Involvement
Lilly CEO Warns UK Is ‘Worst Country in Europe’ for Drug Prices, Pulls Back Investment
Nigel Farage Emerges as Central Force in British Politics with Reform UK Surge
Disney Reinstates ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live!’ after Six-Day Suspension over Charlie Kirk Comments
U.S. Prosecutors Move to Break Up Google’s Advertising Monopoly
Nvidia Pledges Up to $100 Billion Investment in OpenAI to Power Massive AI Data Center Build-Out
U.S. Signals ‘Large and Forceful’ Support for Argentina Amid Market Turmoil
Nvidia and Abu Dhabi’s TII Launch First AI-&-Robotics Lab in the Middle East
Vietnam Faces Up to $25 Billion Export Loss as U.S. Tariffs Bite
Europe Signals Stronger Support for Taiwan at Major Taipei Defence Show
Indonesia Court Upholds Military Law Amid Concerns Over Expanded Civilian Role
Larry Ellison, Michael Dell and Rupert Murdoch Join Trump-Backed Bid to Take Over TikTok
Trump and Musk Reunite Publicly for First Time Since Fallout at Kirk Memorial
Vietnam Closes 86 Million Untouched Bank Accounts Over Biometric ID Rules
×