Criticism of Facebook intensified in 2021. Fr Seán McDonagh looks at former employee Frances Haugen’s allegations that Facebook put “astronomical profits before people”.
In my book, Robots, Ethics and the Future of Jobs, I described how in 2016, at the time of the US presidential election, Cambridge Analytica, a British political consulting firm that combined data mining, brokerage and analysis, harvested the personal data of millions of conservative voters in the US and encouraged them to vote for Donald Trump in the presidential election.
Initially, Facebook did not admit its role in the Cambridge Analytica scandal, until Christopher Wylie, a whistleblower who had worked for Cambridge Analytica broke the story in The Observer newspaper in March 2018.
Facebook came under increased pressure to respond to what happened and finally accepted that it was responsible. As a result, many people claim that Facebook does not respect people’s right to privacy online. This has led to a growing clamour that legislators, both locally and globally, have an obligation and responsibility to regulate the behaviour of powerful, technology companies.
Many of these companies, such as Facebook, enjoy a monopoly situation and should, in justice, be broken up to allow other competitors enter the market. Facebook should be forced to sell Instagram and WhatsApp and must not be allowed to gobble up competitors as they have done in the past.
Criticism of Facebook intensified dramatically in 2021, when Frances Haugen, a product manager at the company, resigned from her job and took tens of thousands of the companies documents with her. These documents show that Facebook knew its products were damaging teenager’s mental health and stirring up ethnic violence in countries such as Ethiopia and Myanmar.
Dan Milmo, writing in The Observer, reported that Haugen alleged that Facebook put “astronomical profits before people”. According to a report in the Irish Times last December, Haugen’s research revealed the effect that Instagram, a company owned by Facebook, has on teenage mental health because their algorithm makes “body image issues worse for one in three teen girls”.
In 2018, a UN fact-finding mission in Myanmar highlighted the role Facebook played in spreading hate speech against the Rohingya people. Last December, the Sunday Business Post reported that a group of Rohingya refugees have requested the Irish government to intervene in their fight to make Facebook pay for its part in the ethnic cleansing operations against them in 2017.
James Douglas who works as a legal adviser for Victim Advocates International believes that Ireland should support the Rohingya, since Facebook’s regional centre is in Ireland and also that Myanmar users’ data is stored in Ireland and content moderation of the site is handled there also.
In October 2021, Haugen testified before the US Senate which sparked a rare display of bipartisanship among Democratic and Republican senators, who were impressed with her competence and concerns. Haugen has also spoken at the British Parliament in London and the European Parliament in Brussels. Facebook challenges some of Haugen’s claims. The company points out that in 2021, it spent $5 billion on improving safety and security and that they have 40,000 people globally working on these issues.
Content moderators in Ireland who filter out repulsive material for Facebook complain that they are given no psychological support for the damage done by looking at such content and that they are poorly paid. One of the points I make in my book, Robots, Ethics and the Future of Jobs, is that we need to understand the enormous power that these multinational companies have, and we also need to challenge their activities from a moral perspective.
Frances Haugen says that her decision to resign from the company and publish Facebook documents came after she moved in with her mother, who had given up an academic career to become an episcopal priest. Obviously, conversations with her mother, helped her make the courageous decisions she made.
It is an open question whether Facebook will change its ways since its finances now are secure. Facebook Ireland has seen a major jump in its revenue and profits from €6.3 billion to €40 billion in 2020. Pre-tax profits rose from €482 million in 2019 to €890 million in 2020.
International Facebook is also doing well financially. It reported its third quarter revenue in 2021 to be $29.01 billion. These are staggering figures, so, while Facebook’s finances are in good shape, its good name is not. Part of the problem, according to Frances Haugen is the control which Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and chief executive, has on the company as he controls the majority of shares. She believes that if independent investors joined the company, they would demand change at the top which would rein-in Zuckerberg’s power.
Interestingly, shares in Facebook’s parent company Meta fell by 26.4 percent on February 3rd 2022. On that day the company suffered a $230 billion wipe out which is one of the biggest losses ever for a US company on Wall Street.
Columban priest, ecotheologian and writer Fr Seán McDonagh was on mission in the Philippines for two decades. He is the author of numerous articles and books including, ‘Climate Change: The Challenge to All of Us’; ‘Care for the Earth’; and ‘Dying for Water’. His latest book ‘Robots, Ethics and the Future of Jobs’ (2021) deals with the rise and staggering advance of Artificial Intelligence [AI] over the past four decades.