We must give young people “tools” … The whistleblower Frances Haugen wants to devote herself to educating young people on social networks, she said after a tour of the capitals of Europe where she tried to denounce her former employer, Facebook.
“I want to continue to fight” for Facebook to change its practices of hyper-amplifying harmful content. “I want to take a tour of the universities in the first quarter”, and allow the youngest to spot the dangerous effects of social networks, added the determined young woman, with a well-honed speech.
A “consortium” of independent researchers and specialists
After slamming the door of Facebook in May, Frances Haugen transmitted thousands of internal documents collected from the giant that she accuses of not protecting its users. She abruptly went from shadows to bright light this fall with damning and high-profile testimony in Congress against her former employer.
The mathematician and data specialist now wants to build a “consortium” of independent researchers and specialists to build social network simulators in the laboratory. “It’s on my Thanksgiving list” – Americans’ traditional holiday next week – to work on this project, she smiles.
These free software simulators would allow researchers and students to conduct experiments on the virality of content. They will be able to “experiment and say to themselves” ah, it’s interesting, here is how we can stop the dissemination of bad content in the network “”, she explains.
Social networks “on a human scale”
Frances Haugen’s fight is not to refine Facebook’s moderation techniques, nor to seek to better discern good and bad content. It is rather to put an end to the hyper-amplification of content, by forcing the Californian giant to reveal all its data on the subject. “If Facebook was forced to show what is wrong, then it would be forced to make changes,” she repeats.
For her, the social network must take on a human scale, for example by complicating the infinite redistribution of content. Forcing a Facebook user to do something voluntary – copy and paste, for example – to repost content that has already been shared twice before arriving home “could have as much of an effect on disinformation as the entire Facebook fact-checking ”, she says.
Facebook could also seek to promote less the formation of groups with millions of subscribers, which it described as a “variant factory” during its hearing in the National Assembly. “Take a group of a million people or five million people, which produces 1,000 pieces of content every day. If the algorithm has to choose three of these contents to broadcast them in the news feeds, it will usually be the most extreme, ”because these are the ones that provoke the most reactions, she regrets.
Warning against the “metavers”
And the whistleblower to warn about the “metavers”, the parallel digital universe where Facebook would like to embark the population. If people spend their time in a virtual world where they have “better clothes, a smarter hairstyle, and a nicer apartment” than in reality, what effect will it have on their sanity, ask? she does.
And what about the “incentives to stay in your virtual reality headset for longer? “. “It is not in five years that we must ask the question, it is in three months,” warns the public enemy number one of Facebook.