THE POWER OF ONE

The Facebook whistleblower extends arguments made in testimony before Congress in 2021.

Data engineer and scientist Haugen makes it abundantly clear that Facebook is not our friend. Its closed-software platform is a deliberate screen against transparency, and its “vast tangle of algorithms” serve as tools able to “exact a crushing, incalculable cost, such as unfairly influencing national elections, toppling governments, fomenting genocide, or causing a teenage girl’s self-esteem to plummet, leading to another death by suicide.” Regarding that software, she makes the salient point that “software is different from physical products because the user can see its results only on a screen.” When she started, the author joined a team whose aim was to ferret out how bad elements were able to spread misinformation and disinformation throughout the social media stream without encountering significant resistance. One clue: By her reckoning, there are at most 50,000 fact-checks generated monthly by Facebook’s journalist partners “for the entire world of three billion…users.” Facebook’s stated intention of being a platform for free expression may be admirable in theory, but in practice, it seeks to create an ever larger audience; being exposed to poisonous ideas is merely collateral damage—or so one would conclude from Haugen’s clearly stated objections. A less attractive matter that emerges from the narrative, unfortunately, is a portrait of an employee who was never quite satisfied with any of the many tech companies in which she worked, including Google, Yelp, and Pinterest, and Haugen’s personal grievances sometimes threaten to bludgeon issues of larger interest. Still, the author delivers on her promise “to tease apart how society and Facebook became entangled in our dystopian dance.” The narrative is overlong, but Haugen’s point that “the vast majority of people do not understand how to use data” is well taken and worth reiterating.

A solid argument for steering well clear of the social media behemoths.