Facebook whistleblower: Elon Musk should publish Twitter’s algorithm

The woman who exposed Facebook’s negligence last year is advising Elon Musk to take Twitter’s algorithm public if he really wants to have an open public square online.

Frances Haugen also said that social networking sites reject government intervention so fiercely because accountability could mean profit margins see a sharp decline of at least 20 percent.

The former product manager for Facebook’s civic integrity team joined a special edition of NBC’s Meet the Press focused on “how social media is shaping our politics” on Sunday morning. Haugen is particularly prepared to speak on the issue after decrying what she described as a pattern in which Facebook prioritizes profit over public safety.

He disclosed tens of thousands of internal Facebook documents to the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Wall Street Journal in 2021.

“One of the biggest things that Elon Musk could do to show that he wants to have the public square is that he could publish the algorithms,” Haugen said.

“Open it,” he urged NBC’s Chuck Todd. He would need more help. It would be cheaper for him. It would be more profitable.

Democratic Sen. Amy Klonuchar, who has long called for more regulation of tech companies, said these platforms should be treated like “publishers.”

“Let’s start facing the facts and stop pretending they’re a little company in a garage,” he told Todd during Sunday’s special Meet the Press broadcast.

Haugen said companies like Facebook care so much about growth and making an even bigger profit that they are “scared” to take any action “because it will take a little bit of a company’s profitability down.”

“Facebook is afraid that if we really had transparency, if we really had accountability, it wouldn’t be a 35 percent profit margin company. They would be a company with 15 percent profit margins,” he continued.

“The way of thinking about security on social media platforms is that there are a lot of very small options where you make them and you lose 0.1 percent of the profit, 0.2 percent of the profit,” Haugen said. “The problem is that these industries are so sensitive to growth that when they don’t grow at the level the market expects, their share prices plummet. And so they are afraid to take even these small actions. Because they will decrease the profitability of a company a bit.’

The day Musk acquired Twitter in October 2022, he posted a memo explaining that he bought the social media platform to further the opportunity for dialogue, which he said was “lost.”

Musk felt that social media in its current state “fed and catered” to “polarized extremes” with the “relentless” pursuit of clicks and views to generate more revenue.

Haugen says that if Musk wants to turn the tide, he must lead the charge on transparency, and that starts with sharing the ever-elusive algorithm.

Haugen says the more transparent tech companies are forced to be, the more their shares plummet.

“Over the course of five years before the Facebook disclosures began to go public, Facebook shares alone declined against the Nasdaq by more than 5 percent, about 25 times, 27 times,” he explained.

“Overwhelmingly, those events where the stock price declined were when something came out that showed Facebook would have to spend more money on security,” Haugen added.

Haugen began publishing extensive Facebook internal communications in September 2021 examining how the company created exemptions for celebrity users, impacted young users, handled vaccine misinformation, and responded to human trafficking and drug cartels on the platform. .