In the catalogue of nonsensical corporate communications emitted by Facebook/Meta over the years, one of the most offensive is surely a lengthy March 2021 blog post penned by none other than Nick Clegg. Reborn apres-politics as vice-president of Facebook’s global affairs and communications division, Clegg decided that a suitable riposte to swelling criticism of the company was to fingerpoint at Facebook’s own users.
Posted to Medium and condensed on Facebook’s corporate website, his post is none-too-subtly titled You and the Algorithm: It Takes Two to Tango, utilising a phrase commonly employed to lay blame. Clegg compares the way content is delivered to a Facebook user’s news feed as being similar to having your partner phone you on your drive home to suggest you pick up some ingredients from the shops, and offer to make dinner based on your selections, producing a “joint effort” between your Tesco choices and your partner’s culinary inspiration.
“The relationship between internet users and the algorithms that present them with personalised content is surprisingly similar,” Clegg states in the most improbable and useless simile ever concocted to depict an algorithm’s veiled interplay of code and data input. The resultant “meal” is a Facebook feed “shaped heavily by your choices and actions”.
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Not only is this a misleadingly simplistic portrayal of complex processes understood only by perhaps a few hundred Facebook engineers, but past tweaks of Facebook algorithms meant they were primed towards upping the most incendiary, reaction-eliciting content (posts with Meaningful Social Engagement, or MSI), often reposts of posts by people or organisations unknown to the viewer. Gaming the system with provocative content from hacked or fake bot accounts by malicious actors (including national governments like Russia) enabled cheap, targeted, hidden and dangerous exploitation of Facebook’s content and ads systems. We don’t get what we deserve, we get manipulated in ways totally invisible to us.
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Six months after Clegg’s post, we’d know just how much we were gaslit by his claims after a former Facebook employee, Frances Haugen, copied 22,000 internal documents before departing the company and then stepped forward to become one of the most impactful whistleblowers of this century.
The anonymous source at first for a devastating series of Wall Street Journal articles called the Facebook Files, Haugen decided to go public and went on to be interviewed by the flagship US investigative TV programme 60 Minutes, and then testified before the US Senate, the European Parliament and many individual governments (she appeared here before the Oireachtas media committee). Haugen opened Facebook’s blackout curtains and showed its internal workings and the harms caused.
In retrospect, Clegg seems to have been tempting, if not taunting, fate, writing, “It is alleged that social media fuels polarisation, exploits human weaknesses and insecurities, and creates echo chambers where everyone gets their own slice of reality, eroding the public sphere and the understanding of common facts. And, worse still, this is all done intentionally in a relentless pursuit of profit.” Haugen would provide definitive documentary evidence to show that all these allegations were spot on. What makes Clegg’s flippant statements particularly odious is that internal documents show the company knew these things, too, and yet took decisions to cut or eliminate specialist teams trying to address these problems, hide evidence and proceed with business as usual.
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Haugen, in both experience and demeanour, was exactly the whistleblower needed to expose the society and democracy-damaging problems at Facebook and social media generally. An engineer and Harvard MBA who’d previously worked for over seven years at Google, she joined Facebook and became involved with teams trying to solve some of these daunting problems. She experienced first hand Facebook’s chaotic management, seemingly arbitrary decisions and disinterest in implementing badly needed technical or cultural changes (employee turnover is apparently high). Just as important, she proved to be an articulate explainer and demystifier of complicated, abstract concepts and systems. She was interesting, authoritative without talking down, and consistently came across as confident and thoughtful under questioning.
Yet behind her measured public persona was a vulnerable private Haugen. In her memoir, The Power of One, Haugen offers us a different kind of brave in revealing those aspects of herself, alongside the details of her whistleblowing “journey” (everything is a journey these days, of course). The Power of One is an engrossing account of how Haugen ended up explaining algorithms and Silicon Valley acronyms to government ministers, television hosts and all of us. But it also reveals an uncertain young woman who struggled with self-doubt, life-threatening health issues and chronic pain even as she excelled in maths and computing and initially embraced the full-on, hard-work culture of Silicon Valley. It’s also intended as an encouragement to others to recognise and embrace their own “power of one”, though that Oprah-worthy angle niggles at times, even if it’s useful to see how Haugen recognises past adversity as enabling her “journey” to whistleblower.
Born in Iowa to academic parents, a solitary Haugen eventually found her niche in school in debate clubs and maths classes, attended an experimental new engineering college rather than MIT and, to her surprise, was hired by Google. Haugen chronicles the stresses of being one of the few female engineers in overwhelmingly male Valley workplaces. Young blonde women, she notes wryly, were generally only seen in corporate public relations divisions, not engineering. Female role models in technology or business were few, though she did some work for a demanding Marissa Mayers, then a stellar figure at Google. All-consuming workdays (and nights) at Google and Facebook led to the emotional and physical stress many others have also documented. Extreme symptoms from undermanaged autoimmune disease placed her in a wheelchair, unable to work for long stretches (she now lives in Puerto Rico because the tropical climate eases her chronic pain and stiffness).
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A reluctant move to Facebook – which already had a poor reputation and, apparently, high employee turnover – sparked Haugen’s interest in working on understanding how its network could be utilised for dangerous misinformation campaigns, especially outside the US, and figuring out how to architect solutions. But as effort after effort was knocked back by senior management and expert teams were dismembered even as they tried to warn of serious problems that could arise in the run-up to the 2020 US presidential election, Haugen grew despondent and frustrated.
As evidence began to link Facebook groups to the January 6th Stop the Steal riots at the US capitol, Wall Street Journal writer Jeff Horwitz contacted Haugen through LinkedIn, initiating a close, trusting relationship that would result in Horwitz’s shocking Facebook Files articles. As Haugen tipped towards becoming a whistleblower, the decision was heavy: “It felt like, on the one hand, I was weighing incredibly high societal costs and on the other, potentially incredibly high personal stakes.”
She credits Horwitz’s support and guidance in helping her understand which documents and subjects needed exposure and scrutiny. She captured information on everything from how teens were abused on Instagram to the privileged treatment celebrities received and the downplaying of evidence that Facebook was being used for human trafficking.
She faced serious risk while trying to get as much documentation as possible before availing of US legal protections for whistleblowers, knowing once she requested protections, her identity could leak and she’d be cut off from Facebook’s internal networks. “If the public was going to get an adequate picture of what was happening inside Facebook, I had to get everything critical on the first try, in one scoop, one big highly manual scrape,” she writes. And she did.
While this fascinating book is right to home in on her Facebook/Meta story, Haugen’s lack of criticism of Google, where she spent the best part of a decade, is a noticeably odd reprieve granted a company even more hermetically sealed off from scrutiny, while similarly accused of an enormous range of disturbing behaviours and violations.
Haugen’s revelations have sparked many well-warranted demands for greater limitations and controls for social media companies, but Haugen rightly warns against “unintended consequences” – every regulatory and operational choice has outcomes, many of which create more risk for the vulnerable, or pose other threats to democracy and important speech freedoms.
She stresses that the evidence of harms shouldn’t obscure the far bigger issues. “The larger problem is that Facebook is allowed to operate in the dark,” without transparency, mostly a law unto itself, without anyone knowing what Facebook/Meta knows, what it does internally or how it takes decisions, or the consequences of those choices. “In my mind, the critical question wasn’t whether [Meta-owned] Instagram was safe or not, or safe enough for enough kids, as important as those questions were. It was whether a company that felt it needed to hide its own research from the public should be the one to decide when ‘too many’ children had been harmed,” she says.
She’s particularly positive about the greater scrutiny and regulation given to Big Tech by Europe, compared to the US, and sees the EU’s incoming Digital Services Act (DSA) as a major and workable step towards more corporate and algorithmic openness, transparency and liability.
The Power of One is an invaluable, approachable exploration of what Haugen discovered as a Silicon Valley and Facebook insider, why she ultimately decided to become a whistleblower, how Facebook’s technologies work and why they can be so harmful. And most important of all, how social media’s problems – realistically – could be mitigated.
Recommended Reading
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power by Shoshana Zuboff (Profile Books, 2019). The lengthy, masterful, defining work for understanding how companies secretively harvest and exploit personal data, fueling a threatening new form of capitalism.
An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination by Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang (Bridge Street Press, 2021). Two New York Times technology and business journalists expose the context for explosive growth at Facebook and the roiling factions and struggles within, under the cold grip of founder Mark Zuckerberg and, until her star waned, Sheryl Sandberg.
The Circle by David Eggers (Penguin Essentials, 2013). A decade-old now, this dystopian novel imagines what might happen if a massive Silicon Valley internet company that combines email, social media and a range of services from finances to healthcare becomes so pervasive that it surveils and gradually shapes private life. Eggers claimed he “didn’t want The Circle to seem to be based on any extant companies” but, really now. The book was adapted into a (mediocre) film and an opera.
