Facebook’s own PR shows Frances Haugen is Right
[NOTE: This is my personal opinion and does not represent the views of my employer]
“It’s one of these unfortunate consequences. No one at Facebook is malevolent, but the incentives are misaligned.” — Frances Haugen
This is the key to understanding what is really happening at Facebook. All of the individuals themselves are some of the most talented, sincere people, each doing their own individual jobs, but because the incentives are set up around increasing revenue (“I made Facebook $300 million more, please promote me”) whereas safety is a “negative externality” that is almost impossible to quantify, the company has a negative impact on society. Internally, people’s moral compasses get confused by the incentives too. As Upton Sinclair said: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
I say this as someone who has worked at Google for 8 years (where I crossed paths briefly with Frances and found her to be a highly principled person) and Uber for 4 years and seen and experienced this first hand.
This paradox of well-intentioned people working through confused incentives makes its way into the public relations statements of Facebook. Facebook’s PR can’t tell outright lies, because that would be too much cognitive dissonance for the people in PR, but at the same time, they are saying true things that nonetheless obscure the truth.
And we as audiences swallow these statements with less critical thinking than we should.
Consider for example the statement that Haugen “did not work on child safety or Instagram or research these issues and has no direct knowledge of the topic from her work at Facebook.” That is true, and Haugen acknowledges it. But does that mean she didn’t have access to the research of that group? That she didn’t have access to information that the rest of us don’t have? That her only criticism or example was that of Instagram and depression? It’s a true statement meant to obscure the truth.
Or consider the statement from Mark Zuckerberg, in which he says “[why would we create] an industry-leading research program to understand these important issues in the first place?” The answers are clear: for keeping up appearances and/or there are some people who occasionally try to disentangle their morals and try to build something and straight out saying no “looks bad”. And it begs the question “why would you dissolve the civic integrity unit immediately after the election?”
Or the unbelievable chutzpah of “If we’re going to have an informed conversation about the effects of social media on young people, it’s important to start with a full picture. We’re committed to doing more research ourselves and making more research publicly available.” If you’re so committed to it, why did it take a whistleblower to release the research that had already been done within the organization?
The fact that these weak statements are the strongest that Facebook PR can make is very telling. These are some of the smartest and most talented people anywhere in PR, yet even the slightest critical analysis quickly reveals how paper thin their arguments are.
It tells you that the essence of Haugen’s claims are correct: there are numerous, well documented cases of Facebook having the choice between positive measurable revenue (which they are arguably obliged by law to deliver to their shareholders) and a negative immeasurable externality, they chose revenue.
It’s on us to collectively make sure that Facebook’s detrimental impact on our society is no longer something that it can externalize and ignore. Our rights, safety and mental health is not something to be sacrificed at the altar of profit.
