'Terrifying': Facebook whistleblower cites violence in Myanmar and Ethiopia, spying by China and Iran | News | henryherald.com

“My fear is that without action, divisive and extremist behaviors we see today are only the beginning. What we saw in Myanmar and now in Ethiopia are the opening chapters of a story so terrifying no one wants to read the end of it,” Haugen said, referring to recent bloodshed in both countries.

Facebook admitted in 2018 that it failed to do enough to prevent the spread of posts whipping up hatred against the persecuted Rohingya minority in Myanmar. It has since vowed to limit the spread of “misinformation” in the country after a military coup earlier this year.

Asked by one senator whether Facebook is used by “authoritarian or terrorist-based leaders” around the world, Haugen responded that such use of the platform is “definitely” happening, and that Facebook is “very aware” of it.

“You could actually find the Chinese, based on them doing these kinds of things,” she said.

Haugen’s team also observed “the active participation of, say, the Iran government doing espionage on other state actors. This is definitely a thing that is happening,” she said.

This summer, Mike Dvilyanski, Facebook’s head of cyber espionage investigations, told CNN the company had disabled “fewer than 200 operational accounts” on its platform associated with the Iranian spying campaign, and notified a similar number of Facebook users they may have been targeted by the group.

Haugen blamed “a consistent understaffing of (Facebook’s) counterespionage information operation and terrorism team” for the ongoing proliferation of such threats however, and said she was also speaking with other parts of Congress about them.

Engagement-based ranking

“I encourage reform of these platforms, not picking and choosing individual ideas, but instead making the ideas safer, less twitchy, less viral, because that is how we scalably solve these problems,” she said.

While Facebook has developed measures to mitigate danger, they are unevenly applied across the world’s languages, Haugen said.

“Facebook also knows, they have admitted in public, that engagement-based ranking is dangerous without integrity and security systems, but then not rolled out those integrity and security systems to most of the languages in the world. And that’s what is causing things like ethnic violence in Ethiopia.”

Following the hearing, Facebook issued a statement attempting to discredit Haugen and disputing “her characterization” of many issues.

“Today, a Senate Commerce subcommittee held a hearing with a former product manager at Facebook who worked for the company for less than two years, had no direct reports, never attended a decision-point meeting with C-level executives — and testified more than six times to not working on the subject matter in question,” read the statement, tweeted by spokesperson Andy Stone.

“We don’t agree with her characterization of the many issues she testified about. Despite all this, we agree on one thing; it’s time to begin to create standard rules for the internet.”

The-CNN-Wire

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