Reining In Facebook
Source: https://www.axios.com/takeaways-facebook-whistleblower-hearing-9f2cddf5-5f8d-4944-87cd-b488bfa3aec1.html
Proposals
In her testimony before the American Congress, Haugen advocates for better social media companies that view their users as consumers instead of commodities. Particularly, she urges prioritising public safety over profit to safeguard public health and democracy. To implement this, Haugen proposes reforming s.230 of the Communications Decency Act 1996 in America to allow these companies to be held liable for their harmful decisions.
After her testimony, Haugen travelled the world to speak to legislators, to help inform them on their regulatory responses. In her sessions with the British and European Parliaments, she advocates for transparency, accountability and “human-scale solutions,” amongst others.
Transparency
Haugen suggests risk assessments, whereby companies and third parties evaluate the harms present on social media platforms and work on viable solutions to mitigate and/or eliminate these harms. The European Union acted on this proposal by amending the Digital Services Act to oblige these companies to undergo independent audits of their risk-management systems and make their algorithms, which collect people’s data and tailor their content, more transparent.
Accountability
The main issue is Facebook’s business model. Facebook collects people’s data, allowing it to know their unique preferences. Consequently, Facebook shows them customised advertisements, optimising the amount of people that avail of a certain business’s goods or services. However, Facebook knowing people’s unique preferences has dire consequences. For instance, Facebook’s algorithm prioritises showing users content that they already assent to. An abundance of this content inhibits people’s ability to consider content they don’t assent to and opinions they don’t agree with. As a result, hate is fostered, and people are polarised. One critical manifestation of this is the aforementioned attack against the Capitol, where some Trump supporters were unable to accept the victory of Trump’s rival, Biden.
Haugen suggests legislators to enact laws that oblige these companies to consider societal risk in their operations, such as when they build a new product. One way for legislators to do this is to impose heavy fines on products that pose a substantial societal risk. For instance, if a product contributes to the development of mental illnesses such as eating disorders.
“Human-scale solutions”
Instead of these companies prioritising offering customised advertisements to their users, Haugen suggests that these companies prioritise offering content from friends and family to make experiences online more pleasant. Furthermore, she suggests making content more difficult to share to mitigate and prevent the spread of hate and misinformation.
Legislative responses
Thankfully, legislators have listened to Haugen’s cries and are implementing changes. In Europe, Haugen’s suggestions are reflected in Parliament amending the Digital Services Act as mentioned above. In Britain, these suggestions are reflected in the Online Safety Bill, which imposes a duty of care on companies to protect users from harmful content.
There’s no doubt that these legislative proposals will significantly mitigate and prevent the issues discussed above. Nevertheless, critics have erred on the side of caution. Regarding the Online Safety Bill, MP David Davis argues that it will introduce a chilling effect on free speech. Additionally, Carnegie Trust argues that it grants the government censorship powers. Regarding both legislative proposals, Karen White argues that they potentially cause confusion, limit users’ choices, stifle innovation and competition - setting a harmful international precedent (Dickson and Goujard, 2021). Therefore, in further amending these legislative proposals, legislators should consider the various interests at stake, including users’ free speech and choices, interests of shareholders, competition and innovation. Afterwards, they should balance these against their aims, including safeguarding democracy, public health and safety, to ensure that these laws don’t disproportionately impact those whose interests are at stake.
By: Maiya Dario