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Andrew Marr hosts Frances Haugen, the whistleblower behind the new film 'The Social Reckoning', starring Mikey Madison, Jeremy Strong, and Jeremy Allen White.
Haugen previously worked as a product manager on the civic integrity team at Facebook and leaked internal documents known as the Facebook Files in 2021. She explains why she believes Meta needs independent observers.
She claims the documents she leaked proved that Facebook prioritised growth over people's safety.
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0:00
The Social Reckoning is a new film that follows the story of Francis Hogan
0:04
the Facebook whistleblower who leaked internal documents known as the Facebook Files in 2021
0:11
So how does the film reveal the underbelly of Silicon Valley? Before we hear from Francis
0:16
here's just an extract from the trailer. This is the journal's new Facebook detective. He's not looking for trouble. He's hunting for it
0:25
You can't use my name and this is all off the record. What would you like to talk about? I ran classifiers on political groups where 30% of content hits multiple risk factors
0:32
Hang on, I don't understand what you're saying. Aren't you a tech reporter? Ish. Ish
0:38
Ish, and I'm joined by Frances Hogan herself now. Frances, did you find the newspaper journalists quite as kind of leaden-footed and unprepared as that suggests
0:50
I feel like I have to speak up for Jeff, because a big part of why I worked with Jeff Horowitz at the Wall Street Journal was
0:57
He was one of the most—he had done the most research. He understood the most about how these systems worked already
1:04
But you remember, this is a movie. We have to have someone who is like the audience surrogate that I get to explain everything to, right
1:10
And so, unfortunately, Jeff comes off as knowing much, much less than he actually knows
1:15
because the Francis Haugen character has to explain things to him. Well, I know much, much less than I actually am pretending to know as well, Francis
1:22
so you can treat me in that way. At the heart of this, there is a moment, a real moment, when the algorithm changed
1:30
Now, for people who haven't really followed this, just tell us what happened and why it was so important
1:36
Back in 2017, 2018, Facebook faced a problem. They needed people to produce more content, you know, post more often on Facebook, because that's the fuel that runs the site
1:46
And the only thing they found that was able to induce people and motivate people to make more was giving them more engagement
1:52
So they changed the algorithm to both encourage the production of engagement and model for other people that this is what Facebook was for
2:00
Unfortunately it also ended up being biased towards more polarizing divisive and radical content So it basically encouraged you to be angry or when you were angry to use Facebook I would say it encouraged you to
2:14
like, comment, put emojis, reshare things. It's just, unfortunately, there's a bias that the
2:22
fastest path to a click is anger. And it was also, of course, having quite an effect on lots
2:28
of younger people's mental health. And Facebook's just paid out something like $18 billion
2:33
in terms of damages for that. Was there any sense when you were talking to your colleagues at the time
2:39
that they understood the damage they were potentially doing? You know, Facebook has an internal culture that really, really, really encourages you
2:47
to focus on all the good you're doing and not to dwell on the bad
2:52
So a recurrent thing that I saw within the company was that people were very good
2:56
at showing you the ways in which they had positively changed people's lives. But like in the example of kids, you know, very, very, very few people inside the company had children
3:05
You know, this is a company that was founded by 19 year olds. And even even some of the older leadership like Mark and Adam Seri, the head of Instagram, their eldest child when I came forward as a whistleblower in 2021 was only about nine years old
3:19
So people never saw the downside. They only ever saw the upside of connecting people
3:24
Because they weren't. It's very interesting because the culture is absolutely crucial to this
3:29
And it's not just very male and macho and highly competitive. There's a kind of messiah complex floating around and an obsession with secrecy
3:37
I'm just interested, having seen it in Meta, are you concerned the same culture is infecting the big AI companies we hear so much about now
3:46
One of the things that I'm very heartened by is the kinds of things that I asked for in 2021 for Meta
3:52
I said, we have to have independent observers inside these companies who are given full access
3:57
to data, even as if they were employees. We're seeing the heads of companies like Anthropoc, like Dario Amade, coming out just a few weeks
4:05
ago saying, we need to legally mandate that there are independent auditors who are confirming
4:11
what we saying to the public to make sure there isn an incentive to cut corners and lie So I do think some lessons have been learned on the tech side but the only way we keep
4:22
up that more conscientious behavior is if we make sure there are legally enforceable
4:28
incentives in the form of legislation requiring those kinds of transparency initiatives
4:34
And here we come to the number of the problem, I suspect, because Dariya Amadai has certainly
4:40
said those things and Anthropik seem to be committed to bringing in outside observation
4:44
In a sense, that part of the industry is growing up or maturing. But that's not necessarily the
4:49
case with the politicians who would have to agree in terms of legal safeguards. I'm thinking of
4:55
your own President Trump, but there's plenty of other examples around the world. But he's so intelligent. That's all we need, right
5:02
Indeed. But in a sense, I mean, I'm joking and laughing, but it's worse than that
5:06
Because if there was going to be real global safeguards, it's not just that Trump and the White House would have to agree to try to impose them quite quickly because, you know, these things are happening very fast
5:18
But he'd have to deal with the Chinese as well. A hundred percent. And that's one of the reasons why I get a little nervous when I see, for example, there's a very, very large movement to stop data centers in the United States
5:30
You know, no one's asking, like, where do those data centers go if they're not in the United States
5:34
Because the idea that the data centers will just magically not be created is unlikely
5:39
What is more likely is that they're going to be built in places that have significantly less civil safeguards
5:44
you know, civil rights, legal protections, privacy rights. They're going to end up in places like China
5:50
And so we do 100% need to be careful that we don't reward cheaters
5:56
Because when we don't have consistent guardrails, and motivates those who are less conscientious to take an accelerated position
6:05
Do you think that the culture, since this film was made, and we've had all the publicity and these huge payouts
6:11
do you think the culture in Meta has changed for the better? I am extremely worried that there has been a culture shift inside of Meta but not in the way that you would expect So I have a number of good friends that are still at meta And I hear from them in like a very nonchalant way whenever I talk to them
6:31
you know, none of those people work on the core product anymore. They work in AI, they work in
6:36
augmented reality, you know, like the metaverse, that kind of thing. And they say to me, like
6:41
as if I'm the one that's slow, doesn't everyone know that social media is over
6:47
Social media is over. So you see actions coming out of the company, like if you read their quarterly filings
6:55
like their financial filings, they're not required to tell us how many kids harm themselves
7:00
but they are required to tell us how many ads they show. And they are increasing the rate at which they show ads by 14% to 20% every quarter
7:10
And you don't do that unless you're not expecting there to be a future
7:14
Remember, every time you increase the, quote, ad load, you decrease how much people want to use your product
7:21
So they are, for some reason, we don't know for certain, but we can imagine why they might be trying to get more money now instead of expecting, like, building a sustainable product over time
7:30
In a sense, it's a sclerotic aging product, perhaps, and they're loading too much onto it
7:37
But it doesn't seem to me that, therefore, the actual product itself is any less toxic or dangerous
7:41
The Molly Russell Foundation, I'm sure you know about the Molly Russell Foundation
7:45
They are now putting ads out at the beginning of the showings of the films in the UK to ram home the message
7:52
Yeah, I think that's wonderful. We definitely—so just for context for your listeners, given that you're not in the United States
7:58
we've made a lot of progress in the U.S. in the form of a 47 U.S. state attorney general settlement lawsuit
8:04
that requires things like kids can't be on Instagram for more than two hours a day
8:09
So Molly Russell, before she died, she was spending five, six hours a day longer consuming self-harm content
8:19
You can't send notifications to kids late at night. You can't send them during the school day. But those legal protections are only for children in the United States
8:25
People in the UK, people in Europe, they need to be standing up and saying, our kids deserve the best, too, because these companies will not get better on their own
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