Talking Facebook (I Mean Meta), Frances Haugen, the Media Exposé, and What This all Means to Washington

The following is an edited snippet of my conversation with Janine Jackson of CounterSpin and FAIR. You can listen to the entire conversation here.

Timothy Karr: Facebook’s unofficial motto used to be “move fast and break things,” and we now know because of these documents is that the things that it has broken include the lives of people in places like the Philippines, Myanmar and Ethiopia. Facebook also moved fast and broke trust in our democratic institutions and emergency health care systems. They thought that they could hide these facts and we owe it to this whistleblower to have brought these things to light.

Janine Jackson: One takeaway from these revelations is that communities of color are really at risk for hate, harassment and violence that Facebook foments intentionally.     

Timothy Karr: There’s been a real failure when its comes to non-English disinformation that’s spread over the network. And it’s not only a problem in countries like India, in the Middle East and North Africa, in Myanmar and Ethiopia and elsewhere, it’s a problem in the United States where we have a number of diaspora communities who don’t speak English and often rely on Facebook in their own languages as a source of news and information. And Facebook just hasn’t dedicated its resources to vetting those languages. So we find that the spread of disinformation on COVID, or on the 2020 elections results for example is far worse in non-English speaking communities that use Facebook.

Janine Jackson: I wonder if you would talk about what serious responses to the harms that have been revealed about Facebook, what that might look like.

Timothy Karr: A lot of the interesting work that’s being done in Congress is about looking at the business model, a model that puts engagement and growth before the health and welfare of a multiracial democracy. And we need to start questioning the way data are used and to start questioning how data are abused in discriminatory ways…. There is a role not only for Congress to push for transparency, but transparency is only a part of the picture. We need also to make sure that if data are being collected that they are being used to protect the civil rights of individuals and can’t be used in discriminatory ways. The FTC also has the authority to conduct a rule-making process about how not just Facebook but other social media platforms use data. We've been very involved in organizing support in Congress and at the FTC to create a stronger regulatory framework to prevent these types of abuses from occurring again.