Praised to the skies, vilified, outmoded, resurrected… In twenty years, Facebook, renamed Meta, has experienced all stages of fame. However, the nature of the iconic social network has long been misunderstood, and its influence underestimated. Former engineer of the group, at the origin of the series of investigations of Wall Street Journal Facebook Fileswhistleblower Frances Haugen published by Éditions Fayard The Truth on Facebook. A dive into the complex functioning of the company that reigns today over 4 billion souls. Interview
L’Express: Has Facebook found itself confronted with ethical questions of unprecedented complexity?
Frances Haugen: Each time a new technology or industry appears, a period of time is necessary for society to learn to understand it, control it, and study it. And we have been faced with a major transition: the transition from an economy of the tangible – oriented towards things that we can see and touch – to an economy of the intangible. Furthermore, each of us sees a different version of Facebook, this poses an immense challenge, which I think society does not fully appreciate. The third important point to note is that Facebook has changed a lot since its inception. When you talk about Facebook, people tell you that this platform allows them to see posts from their family and friends. But that’s only a small fraction of what you see now: the algorithms suggest very different content that they think will be relevant to you.
It’s amazing to see a product change so much without anyone noticing. This is an unprecedented phenomenon. In the food industry, if a manufacturer changes its recipe, consumers quickly see it. We come back to the fundamental difference between the economy of the tangible and the economy of the intangible. Social networks also understood that the less they gave us access to their data, the less we would be able to form an opinion on their functioning. Information asymmetry has created power asymmetry. Scientific publications publishing studies on Facebook have highlighted this: as long as we allow platforms to cherry-pick what questions we can ask them and how we can study them, we will never know the truth.
Are social networks easier to audit than they suggest? And how do you go about dissecting them?
There are two types of transparency. The most obvious is access to raw data. But there is another form of transparency that is simpler to implement. For example, each platform calculates the estimated age of each of its users. For what ? Because a lot of people lie about their age when they sign up. But advertisers want to know this information as precisely as possible in order to target you. We could therefore look at the volume of users whose estimated age is 14 years old. Then study the portion of them that was already on the network 3, 4 or 5 years ago. This does not infringe on users’ privacy. And if Facebook were to publish these types of figures every month, we would have a clearer view of what is happening and the sincerity of their prevention efforts.
Faced with these complex ethical questions, what do you think Meta should have done differently?
I think Facebook has been trying to deal with these issues for a long time. Given their scale, he would have had to assign 5 to 10 times more people to these subjects. But this is probably the group that had put together the best research team in the industry on these questions. One of the challenges here is that we’re not training people to tackle these issues. There isn’t really a university course that teaches you how to manage them. These teams were therefore formed internally. But Facebook has significantly reduced its focus on these subjects in recent times. For what ? Because the needs of the public are different from the needs of Facebook. Civil society must have its own experts.
Isn’t that the real problem? That public authorities do not look into the regulation of social networks that 15 to 20 years after the creation of Facebook?
We have never found ourselves confronted with such disruptive software companies. Microsoft had a huge influence with its operating system and products. But these groups did not generate a network effect like social platforms do.
What should we ask of social media?
We should ask them to treat us with more dignity and respect. At the moment, for example, we have little influence on what the algorithm serves us. Psychologists were telling me about the difficulties Instagram posed for some of their very young patients with eating disorders. They try to change but content on this theme pursues them on the social network. They cannot easily influence the type of publications offered to them. And the platform is where their memories, their friends are. It is difficult for them to leave her. Another example ? The notifications. In 2018 or 2019, there were suggestions to change the way notifications worked. Because they could solicit users late at night, this generated unnecessary stress for people. It was suggested to attenuate them. And the results of the first experiments were positive: users said they were less stressed. But this lowered the frequency of use, and this parameter was more important than the others in the eyes of Facebook.
Could social networks with different economic models have enjoyed similar success without some of these perverse effects?
It’s important to remember: with Facebook, we don’t use a product, we are the product. The problem with this type of advertising-backed economic model is that it does not aim to increase our well-being. I think that in the next five years, radically different social networks will emerge and be more user-oriented. Internet users hate the fact of not having influence on things that matter to them. This makes young people increasingly angry at being seen as products.
At what level do you think we need to improve the regulation of social networks?
More than forty American states have filed complaints against Meta. The coming year will therefore be interesting to follow. Many options can be explored. I think we should ban children from social media after 11 p.m. We can’t ask children to resist on their own the treasures of ingenuity deployed by thousands of web designers to make them want to stay. The European DSA formulates things very skillfully. I see Meta making changes I never imagined him making before. And I think they do it in anticipation of what might be asked of them. If they end up having to reveal precisely the number of certain contents, those relating to self-harm for example, they have every interest in reducing them as much as possible.
.