The executives of Facebook (and Instagram) have been in turmoil for a few weeks. Thousands of documents on the practices of the social network have been made public by a major American media, the Wall Street Journal. We explain here what has been revealed!
Why is Facebook in the news?
Former Facebook employee Frances Haugen shared thousands of documents on social media practices at the end of September. She is what is called a whistleblower
. She spoke publicly to denounce these practices.
Who is Frances Haugen?
She worked for almost two years on the team studying how Facebook contributes to election results around the world. She resigned in May 2021, since she did not feel comfortable with the practices of the company. Haugen argued that she didn’t want to destroy Facebook, only to make it better.
Instagram harmful to young people?
Thanks to Frances Haugen, we learned that Facebook has studied the impact of Instagram on the mental health and body image of adolescents. According to their studies, 32% of teenage girls who were already dissatisfied with their appearance said that Instagram had made their body image worse.
The hatred put forward
Facebook’s algorithms, sort of filters that choose the content you see in your news feed, favor the content that makes you react. It makes hateful content and conspiracy theories come up a lot. According to Haugen, Facebook leaves this content on the platform so as not to lose users.
International violence
According to the whistleblower, Facebook has contributed to acts of violence committed against ethnic minorities in Ethiopia and Myanmar. Why? There are not enough Facebook employees who speak the languages of these countries to moderate the violent content.
Facebook defends itself
Facebook reacted this week to the accusations against the company. Mark Zuckerberg, president and founder of Facebook, replied that it’s just not true
. Facebook concedes, however, that the Internet needs to be regulated by new laws.
Instagram and young people
These revelations come as Facebook has taken a hiatus Instagram Kids
, a version of the application for children under 13. The project had to be a safer environment for young people, in particular without advertising and without collecting data from its users.
One more failure
In addition to this story, a major outage affected the service of Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp on Monday. The two events cost Mark Zuckerberg nearly $ 6 billion.
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