Nick Clegg sought to defuse allegations that Facebook is the primary cause behind the polarisation that led to the US Capitol Hill riots in January, days before a former employee blamed the social network for the insurrection by amplifying hate and misinformation.
The former deputy prime minister and leader of the Liberal Democrats, now Facebook’s vice president of policy and public affairs, sent a 1,500-word memo to members of staff on Friday last week warning them about the “misleading” accusations Frances Haugen was planning to make in a televised interview on Sunday, according to the New York Times.
Ms Haugen, a former product manager on Facebook’s civic integrity team, said the platform’s decision to shut down her division shortly after the declaration of the US presidential election in November paved the way for the storming of the Capitol that led to the death of five people.
Mr Clegg attempted to downplay Ms Haugen’s claims ahead of her interview, saying that the increase in political polarisation in the US pre-dated social media “by several decades“.
“The rise of polarisation has been the subject of swathes of serious academic research in recent years. In truth, there isn’t a great deal of consensus,” he told workers.
“But what evidence there is simply does not support the idea that Facebook, or social media more generally, is the primary cause of polarisation.”
Ms Haughen, who joined the company in 2019, shared internal research with The Wall Street Journal that claiming Facebook had conducted extensive research into Instagram’s negative effects on younger users – specifically teenage girls – but downplayed its significance in public.
The backlash to the reports led Instagram to pause its version of Instagram aimed at under-13s last week.
She told CBS’s 60 Minutes programme that Facebook had “over and over again… shown it chooses profit over safety”, and that by shutting down its civic integrity team, had caused her to think: ‘I don’t trust that they’re willing to actually invest what needs to be invested to keep Facebook from being dangerous.’
“No one at Facebook is malevolent, but the incentives are misaligned, right?” she said.
“Facebook makes more money when you consume more content. People enjoy engaging with things that elicit an emotional reaction. And the more anger that they get exposed to, the more they interact and the more they consume.”
Facebook is aware of and is capable of making greater efforts to prevent disinformation across its platforms, but priorities engagement and advertising revenue over user safety, she said, adding that employees who raised concerns around the amplification algorithms were ignored.
“Facebook has realised that if they change the algorithm to be safer, people will spend less time on the site, they’ll click on less ads, and [Facebook] will make less money,” she continued.
“There were conflicts of interest between what was good for the public and what was good for Facebook. Facebook over and over again chose to optimize for its own interests, like making more money.”
A Facebook spokesperson said: “Every day our teams have to balance protecting the right of billions of people to express themselves openly with the need to keep our platform a safe and positive place.
“We continue to make significant improvements to tackle the spread of misinformation and harmful content. To suggest we encourage bad content and do nothing is just not true.
“If any research had identified an exact solution to these complex challenges, the tech industry, governments, and society would have solved them a long time ago.”
