Frances Haugen had been a product manager on Facebook’s Civic Integrity team. She left in May 2021 with copies of the company’s internal research and, on October 5, sat down in front of the Senate Commerce subcommittee that handles consumer protection. Chairman Richard Blumenthal opened the questioning by saying he wanted answers he could get yes or no.
Looking under the hood
BlumenthalSo I'm going to ask you a few straightforward questions to break down some of what you have said and if you can answer them yes or no that would be great. Has Facebook's research, its own research, ever found that its platforms can have a negative effect on children and teens' mental health or well-being?
HaugenMany of Facebook's internal research reports indicate that Facebook has a serious negative harm on a significant portion of teenagers and children.
BlumenthalAnd has Facebook ever offered features that it knew had a negative effect on children's and teens' mental health?
HaugenFacebook knows that its amplification algorithms, things like engagement-based ranking on Instagram, can lead children from very innocuous topics, like healthy recipes, I think all of us could eat a little more healthy, all the way from just something innocent like healthy recipes to anorexia-promoting content over a very short period of time.
BlumenthalAnd has Facebook ever found, again in its research, that kids show signs of addiction on Instagram?
HaugenFacebook has studied a pattern that they call "problematic use," what we might more commonly call "addiction." It has a very high bar for what it believes it is. It says you self-identify that you don't have control over your usage and that it is materially harming your health, your schoolwork, or your physical health. Five to 6 percent of 14-year-olds have the self-awareness to admit both those questions. It is likely that far more than five to 6 percent of 14-year-olds are addicted to Instagram.
BlumenthalLast Thursday, my colleagues and I asked Ms. Davis, who was representing Facebook, about how the decision would be made whether to pause permanently Instagram for Kids and she said, "There's no one person who makes a decision like that. We think about that collaboratively." It is as though she could not mention Mark Zuckerberg's name. Isn't he the one who will be making this decision from your experience in the company?
HaugenMark holds a very unique role in the tech industry in that he holds over 55 percent of all the voting shares for Facebook. There are no similarly powerful companies that are as unilaterally controlled. In the end, the buck stops with Mark. There is no one currently holding Mark accountable but himself.
BlumenthalAnd Mark Zuckerberg in effect is the algorithm designer-in-chief, correct?
HaugenI received an MBA from Harvard and they emphasize to us that we are responsible for the organizations that we build. Mark has built an organization that is very metrics-driven. It is intended to be flat. There is no unilateral responsibility. The metrics make the decision. Unfortunately, that itself is a decision and in the end, if he is the CEO and the Chairman of Facebook, he is responsible for those decisions.
BlumenthalThe buck stops with him.
HaugenThe buck stops with him.
BlumenthalAnd speaking of the buck stopping, you have said that Facebook should declare moral bankruptcy. I agree.
HaugenYes.
BlumenthalI think its actions and its failure to acknowledge its responsibility indicate moral bankruptcy.
HaugenThere is a cycle occurring inside the company where Facebook has struggled for a long time to recruit and retain the number of employees it needs to tackle the large scope of projects that it has chosen to take on. Facebook is stuck in a cycle where it struggles to hire. That causes it to understaff projects, which causes scandals, which then makes it harder to hire. Part of why Facebook needs to come out and say we did something wrong, we made some choices that we regret is the only way we can move forward and heal Facebook is we first have to admit the truth. The way we will have reconciliation and we can move forward is by first being honest and declaring moral bankruptcy.
[Hearing transcript, October 5, 2021, questioning by Sen. Blumenthal.]
The 600,000 accounts
Ranking Member Marsha Blackburn had questioned Facebook’s global head of safety, Antigone Davis, five days earlier.
BlackburnI want to stay with Ms. Davis and some of her comments because I had asked her last week about the underage users and she had made the comment, I'm going to quote from her testimony, "If we find an account of someone who's under 13, we remove them. In the last 3 months, we removed 600,000 accounts of under 13-year-olds." And I have to tell you, it seems to me that there's a problem if you have 600,000 accounts from children who ought not to be there in the first place. So what did Mark Zuckerberg know about Facebook's plans to bring kids on as new users and advertise to them?
HaugenThere are reports within Facebook that show cohort analyses where they examine out what ages do people join Facebook and Instagram, and based on those cohort analyses, so Facebook likes to say children lie about their ages to get on to the platform. The reality is enough kids tell the truth that you can work backward to figure out what are approximately the real ages of anyone who's on the platform. When Facebook does cohort analyses and looks back retrospectively, it discovers things like, you know, up to 10 to 15 percent of even 10-year-olds in a given cohort may be on Facebook or Instagram.
BlackburnOK. So this is why Adam Mosseri, who's the CEO of Instagram, would have replied to JoJo Siwa when she said to him, "Oh, I've been on Instagram since I was eight," he said he didn't want to know that. So it would be for this reason, correct?
HaugenA pattern of behavior that I saw at Facebook was that often problems were so understaffed that there was kind of an implicit discouragement from having better detection systems. So, for example, my last team at Facebook was on the Counterespionage Team within the Threat Intelligence Org, and at any given time our team could only handle a third of the cases that we knew about. We knew that if we built even a basic detector, we would likely have many more cases.
BlackburnOK. Then let me ask you this. So you look at the way that they have the data but they're choosing to keep that data and advertise from it, right?
HaugenYes.
BlackburnSell it to third parties. So what does Facebook do? You've got these 600,000 accounts that ought not to be on there and----
HaugenProbably more.
BlackburnRight. But then you delete those accounts, but what happens to that data? Does Facebook keep that data? Do they keep it until those children go to age 13 since you're saying they can work backward and figure out the true age of a user? So what do they do with it? Do they delete it? Do they store it? Do they keep it? How do they process that?
HaugenMy understanding of Facebook's scatter retention policies--let me be really clear. I didn't work directly on that--is that they delete--when they delete an account, they delete all the data I believe within 90 days in compliance with the GDPR. With regard to children underage on the platform, Facebook does substantially more to detect more of those children and they should have to publish for Congress those processes because there are lots of subtleties in those things and they could be much more effective than probably what they're doing today.
BlackburnWell, start with maybe how do they recruit children for focus groups or recruit teenagers?
HaugenMost tech companies have systems where they can analyze the data that is on their servers. So most of the focus groups I read or that I saw analysis of were around Messenger Kids which has children on it and those focus groups appear to be children interacting in person. Often large tech companies use either sourcing agencies that will go and identify people who meet certain demographic criteria or they will reach out directly based on data on the platform. So, for example, in the case of Messenger Kids, maybe you would want to study a child that was an active user and one that was a less active user. You might reach out to some that came from each population.
BlackburnAnd so these are children that are under age 13?
HaugenYes.
BlackburnAnd they know it?
HaugenFor some of these studies, and I assume they get permission but I don't work on that.
BlackburnOK. Well, we're still waiting to get a copy of that parental consent form that would involve children.
[Hearing transcript, October 5, 2021, questioning by Sen. Blackburn.]
Fifty-one dollars and fifty-eight cents
KlobucharDoes it make sense that having a younger person get hooked on social media at a young age makes them more profitable over the long term as they have a life ahead of them?
HaugenFacebook's internal documents talk about the importance of getting younger users, for example, tweens, on to Instagram, like Instagram Kids, because they need to have--like they know that children bring their parents online and things like that and so they understand the value of younger users for the long-term success of Facebook.
KlobucharFacebook reported advertising revenue to be $51.58 per user----
HaugenOh, wow.
Klobuchar--last quarter in the U.S. and Canada. When I asked Ms. Davis how much of that came from Instagram users under 18, she wouldn't say. Do you think that teens are profitable for their company?
HaugenI would assume so, based on advertising for things like television. You get substantially higher advertising rates for customers who don't yet have preferences or habits and so I'm sure they are some of the more profitable users on Facebook, but I did not work directly on that.
KlobucharI know it's personal to you. Do you think that their algorithms push some of this content to young girls?
HaugenFacebook knows that the engagement-based ranking, the way that they pick the content in Instagram for young users, for all users, amplifies preferences, and they have done something called a "proactive incident response" where they take things that occur, for example, like can you be led by the algorithms to anorexia content, and they have literally recreated that experiment themselves and confirmed yes, this happens to people. So Facebook knows that they are leading young users to anorexia content.
KlobucharDo you think they are deliberately designing their product to be addictive beyond even that content?
HaugenFacebook has a long history of having a successful and very effective growth division where they take little tiny tweaks and they constantly, constantly, constantly are trying to optimize it to grow. Those kinds of stickiness could be construed as things that facilitate addiction.
KlobucharDo you think that Facebook turned off the safeguards because they were costing the company money, because it was reducing profits?
HaugenFacebook has been emphasizing a false choice. They've said the safeguards that were in place before the election implicated free speech. The choices that were happening on the platform were really about how reactive and twitchy was the platform, right, like how viral was the platform, and Facebook changed those safety defaults in the run-up to the election because they knew they were dangerous and because they wanted that growth back. They wanted the acceleration of the platform back after the election. They returned to their original defaults and the fact that they had to break the glass on January 6th and turn them back on, I think that's deeply problematic.
[Hearing transcript, October 5, 2021, questioning by Sen. Klobuchar.]
Why she left
SchatzThank you for your courage in coming forward. Was there a particular moment when you came to the conclusion that reform from the inside was impossible and that you decided to be a whistleblower?
HaugenIt was a long series of moments where I became aware that Facebook conflicts of interests between its own profits and the common good public safety that Facebook consistently chose to prioritize its profits. I think the moment which I realized we needed to get help from the outside, that the only way these problems would be solved is by solving them together, not solving them alone, was when Civic Integrity was dissolved following the 2020 election. It really felt like a betrayal of the promises that Facebook had made to people who had sacrificed a great deal to keep the election safe by basically dissolving our community and integrating into just other parts of the company.
SchatzAnd I know their response is that they sort of distributed the duties.
HaugenYes.
SchatzThat's an excuse, right?
HaugenI cannot see into the hearts of other men and I don't know what----
SchatzLet me say it this way. It won't work, right?
HaugenI can tell you that when I left the company, so the people who I worked with were disproportionately maybe 75 percent of my pod of seven people, those are product managers, program managers, most of them come from Civic Integrity. All of us left the Inauthentic Behavior pod either for other parts of the company or the company entirely over the same 6-week period of time. So 6 months after the reorganization, we had clearly lost faith that those changes were coming.
SchatzDo you believe that they're actually going to discontinue Instagram Kids or they're just waiting for the dust to settle?
HaugenI would be sincerely surprised if they do not continue working on Instagram Kids and I would be amazed if a year from now we don't have this conversation again.
SchatzWhy?
HaugenFacebook understands that if they want to continue to grow, they have to find new users, they have to make sure that the next generation is just as engaged with Instagram as the current one, and the way they'll do that is by making sure that children establish habits before they have good self-regulation.
SchatzBy hooking kids?
HaugenBy hooking kids. I'd like to emphasize one of the documents that we sent in on problematic use examined the rates of problematic use by age and that peaked with 14-year-olds. It's just like cigarettes. Teenagers don't have good self-regulation. They say explicitly I feel bad when I use Instagram and yet I can't stop. We need to protect the kids.
SchatzIf you were a member of this panel, would you believe what Facebook is saying?
HaugenI would not believe. Facebook has not earned a right to just have blind trust in them. Trust is--last week one of the most beautiful things I heard on the committee was trust is earned and Facebook has not earned our trust.
[Hearing transcript, October 5, 2021, questioning by Sen. Schatz.]
Ethiopia, and the bonuses
The full committee chair, Maria Cantwell of Washington, took over the questioning. The transcript labels her turns “The Chairwoman.”
ChairwomanSo you're saying the documents exist that at the highest level at Facebook you had information discussing these two choices and that people chose, even though they knew that it was misinformation and hurtful and maybe even causing people lives, they continued to choose profit?
HaugenWe have submitted documents to Congress outlining Mark Zuckerberg was directly presented with a list of "soft interventions." So hard intervention is like taking a piece of content off Facebook, taking a user off Facebook. Soft interventions are about making slightly different choices to make the platform less viral, less twitchy. Mark was presented with these options and chose to not remove downstream MSI in April 2020 in even just isolated and at-risk countries, that's countries at risk of violence, if it had any impact on the overall MSI metric. So he chose----
ChairwomanWhich, in translation, means less money,----
HaugenYes, he said----
Chairwoman--right? Was there another reason given why they would do it, other than they thought it would really affect their numbers?
HaugenI don't know for certain. Like Jeff Horowitz, the reporter at the Wall Street Journal, and I struggled with this. We sat there and read these minutes and were like how is this possible, like we've just read a hundred pages on how downstream MSI expands hate speech, misinformation, violence-inciting content, graphic violent content, why wouldn't you get rid of this, and the best theory that we've come up with, and I want to emphasize this is just our interpretation on it, is people's bonuses are tied to MSI, right. Like people stay or leave the company based on what they get paid and like if you hurt MSI, a bunch of people weren't going to get their bonuses.
ChairwomanSo you're saying that this practice even still continues today? Like we're still in this environment? I'm personally----
HaugenOh, yes.
ChairwomanNow you're pointing out that these same algorithms are being used and they know darn well in Ethiopia that it's causing and inciting violence and again they are still today choosing profit over taking this information down, is that correct?
HaugenWhen rioting began in the United States in the summer of last year, they turned off downstream MSI only for when they detected content was health content, which is probably COVID, and civic content, but Facebook's own algorithms are bad at finding this content. It's still in the raw form for 80-90 percent of even that sensitive content. In countries where they don't have integrity systems in the local language and in the case of Ethiopia, there is a hundred million people in Ethiopia and six languages. Facebook only supports two of those languages for integrity systems. This strategy of focusing on language-specific content-specific systems AI to save us is doomed to fail.
ChairwomanSo I think you're finding for the SEC is an interesting one, but I think that we also have to look at what are the other issues here and one of them is did they defraud advertisers in telling them this was the advertising content that you were going to be advertising and when, in reality, it was something different. It was based on a different model.
HaugenWe have multiple examples of question and answers for the advertising staff, the sales staff where advertisers say after the riots last summer were asked should we come back to Facebook or after the insurrection, like should we come back to Facebook, and Facebook said in their talking points that they gave to advertisers we're doing everything in our power to make this safer or we take down all the hate speech when we find it.
ChairwomanThat was not true.
HaugenThat was not true.
ChairwomanThank you.
HaugenThey get three to 5 percent of hate speech.
[Hearing transcript, October 5, 2021, questioning by Sen. Cantwell, labelled in the record as the Chairwoman.]
What the research shows
SullivanI think we're going to look back 20 years from now and all of us are going to be like what in the hell were we thinking when we recognize the damage that's done to a generation of kids. Do you agree with that, Ms. Haugen?
HaugenWhen Facebook has made statements in the past about how much benefit Instagram is providing to kids' mental health, like kids are connecting who were once alone, why I'm so surprised about what is if Instagram is such a positive force, have we seen a golden age of teenage mental health in the last 10 years? No. We've seen----
SullivanWe've seen the opposite, right?
HaugenWe've seen escalating rates of suicide and depression amongst teenagers.
SullivanDo you think those rates are at least in part driven by the social media phenomena?
HaugenThere is a broad swath of research that supports the idea that usage of social media amplifies the risk for these mental health harms.
SullivanRight now this hearing is helping to illuminate it. We are seeing----
HaugenAnd Facebook's own research shows that.
SullivanRight. Say that again. That's important.
HaugenAnd Facebook's own research shows that, right, that kids are saying I am unhappy when I use Instagram and I can't stop, that if I leave I'm afraid I'll be ostracized.
SullivanRight.
HaugenAnd that's so sad.
SullivanSo they know that.
HaugenThat's what the research shows.
SullivanSo one of the things--this is a very different topic and I only got a minute or so left, but right now is Facebook--I know Facebook is not allowed in countries like China, but do they provide platforms for authoritarian or terrorist-based leaders, like the Ayatollahs in Iran, that's the largest state-sponsored terrorism in the world, or the Taliban or Xi Jinping or certain, in my view, our biggest rival for this century, a Communist Party dictator who's trying to export his authoritarian model around the world, do they provide a platform for those kind of leaders who, in my view, clearly don't hold America's interests in mind? Does Facebook provide that platform?
HaugenDuring my time working with the Threat Intelligence Org, so I was a product manager supporting the Counterespionage Team, my team directly worked on tracking Chinese participation on the platform, surveilling, say, weaker populations in places around the world. You could actually find the Chinese based on them doing these kinds of things.
SullivanSo Facebook--I'm sorry.
HaugenWe also saw active participation of, say, the Iran Government doing espionage on other state actors. So this is definitely a thing that is happening and I believe Facebook's consistent understaffing of the Counter-espionage Information Operations and Counterterrorism Teams is a national security issue and I'm speaking to other parts of Congress about that.
[Hearing transcript, October 5, 2021, questioning by Sen. Sullivan.]
The black box
In the second round Blumenthal returned to the question of legal exposure, and then asked what parents were supposed to do that evening.
BlumenthalEssentially you can't sue Facebook. You have no recourse. Most of America doesn't know about Section 230 and if you pushed a lot of Members of Congress, they wouldn't know either.
HaugenIt's actually slightly worse than that. Facebook made a statement in a legal proceeding recently where they said they had the right to mislead the court because they had immunity, right, that 230----
Blumenthal--Exactly----
Haugen--gave them immunity, so why should they have to tell the truth about what they're showing?
BlumenthalWhich is kind of----
HaugenShocking.
Blumenthal--concerning. Well, it is shocking to a lawyer, which some of us are. It is also utter disregard and contempt for the Rule of Law and for the very legal structure that gives them that kind of protection. So it's kind of a new low in corporate conduct at least in court.
BlumenthalWhat would you tell parents right now? What would you advise them about what they can do because they need more tools and some of the proposals that have been mentioned here would give parents more tools to protect their children?
HaugenVery rarely do you have one of these generational shifts where the generation that leads, like parents who guide their children, have such a different set of experiences that they do not have the context to support their children in a safe way. There is an active need for schools or maybe the National Institutes of Health to make established information where if parents want to learn how they can support their kids, it should be easy for them to know what is constructive and not constructive because Facebook's own research says kids today feel like they are struggling alone with all these issues because their parents can't guide them. One of the things I am saddest is when I look on Twitter is when people blame the parents for these problems with Facebook. They say just take your kid's phone away and the reality is the issues are a lot more complicated than that. And so we need to support parents because right now if Facebook won't protect the kids, we at least need to help the parents to protect the kids.
BlumenthalWhat I hear you saying is that again and again and again these recommendations were just rejected or disregarded, correct?
HaugenThere is a pattern of behavior that I saw at Facebook of Facebook choosing to prioritize its profits over people and any time that Facebook faced even tiny hits to growth, like .1 percent of sessions, 1 percent of views, that it chose its profits over safety.
BlumenthalAnd you mentioned, I think, bonuses tied to downstream MSIs.
HaugenTo core MSI, yes.
BlumenthalCould you explain what you meant?
HaugenSo MSI is Meaningful Social Interaction. Facebook's internal governance is very much based around metrics. So Facebook is incredibly flat to the point where they have the largest open floor plan office in the world. It's a quarter of a mile long and one room, right, they believe in flat. Instead of having internal governance, they have metrics that people try to move. In a world like that, it doesn't matter that we now have multiple years of data saying MSI may be encouraging bad content, might be making spaces where people are scared, where they are shown information that puts them at risk. It's so hard to dislodge a ruler like that that--a yardstick, that you end up in a situation where because no one is taking leadership, like no one is intentionally designing these systems, it's just many, many people running in parallel, all moving the metric, that these problems get amplified and amplified and amplified and no one steps in to bring the solutions.
[Hearing transcript, October 5, 2021, second round of questioning by Sen. Blumenthal.]
Instagram Kids had been put on pause before the hearing, a fact several senators noted. Haugen told Senator Schatz she would be amazed if the subject did not come back within a year.