Facebook whistleblower urges NZ lawmakers to demand transparency from tech giants – The Front Page

Mark Zuckerberg, Lauren Sanchez, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai, and Elon Musk, during the inauguration of Donald Trump. Photo / Julia Demaree via Getty Images

A Facebook whistleblower has issued a stern warning to New Zealand lawmakers not to be afraid to demand transparency from Silicon Valley tech giants.

Meta – the parent company of Facebook and Instagram – will, starting in the United States, end its third-party fact-checking programme and move to a “Community Notes” model – where users are in charge of deciding when posts are “potentially misleading or need more context”.

Similar to what X implemented after its rebranding from Twitter, chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said it was “time to get back to our roots”, adding “governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more”.

The word “censor” stands out to Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee turned advocate for accountability and transparency in social media.

In 2021, she made public tens of thousands of the company’s internal documents, which led to allegations including that the social media giant knew its products were damaging to mental health and that it failed to curb misinformation ahead of the January 6 riots.

Haugen told The Front Page that Facebook knows there are ways to implement safety measures that aren’t content moderation.

“Saying the word ‘safety’ is synonymous with censorship and Mark [Zuckerberg] got up publicly no more than a few weeks ago and said over and over again in his announcement the word ‘censorship’, further equating in people’s minds that safety and censorship are so intimately intertwined,” she said.

The move to stop independent fact-checking doesn’t surprise Haugen, who said their introduction was superficial anyway.

“Every month they fact-checked, maybe hundreds, less than 500. We’re talking 300 or 200 pieces of content globally when Facebook was producing hundreds of millions, if not billions of pieces of content globally.

“So in many ways, we’re ending an era of lipstick on the pig.

“I think the larger issue is around how a lot of this has been framed. The idea that Facebook is ‘fighting for freedom and fighting for freedom of speech.’ And yet we see that they’re quite willing to take down content from issues that may be politically expedient to them,” she said.

In a press release, Facebook explained that the launch of the fact-checking programme in 2016 was intended to give people more information about what they see online – but “that’s not the way things played out”.

“Experts, like everyone else, have their own biases and perspectives. This showed up in the choices some made about what to fact-check and how,” it said. “A programme intended to inform too often became a tool to censor.”

The bosses of some of the world’s biggest tech companies, including Google, Amazon, Meta, X, Apple, OpenAI and TikTok, are present at Donald Trump’s inauguration ceremony in Washington.

Watch #Newsnight Trump inauguration special - BBC Two & @BBCNews 10.30pm pic.twitter.com/LjcP47fEyw

— BBC Newsnight (@BBCNewsnight) January 20, 2025

Donald Trump’s inauguration saw the likes of Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, X’s Elon Musk, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, and Google’s Sundar Pichai in the front row, with the new administration’s Cabinet sitting behind them.

Haugen suspects their high involvement hints at a belief Trump represents a second chance for these companies — which are more prevalently facing legal roadblocks from governments worldwide.

“They know how flattery works. This is what foreign Governments realised in the first Trump administration. The number one thing that you can do to get your way is just make him feel like a really big man. And so we have the situation now where tech chief executives are coming in and saying, as long as we can stay on on Trump’s good side,” she said.

Haugen warns the New Zealand Government of the need to better understand the internet’s ability to influence opinion and the dangers it poses.

“Ensuring that, at a minimum, we get transparency on national security issues is not a nice to have for operating a democracy in the 21st century, it’s a must-have.

“If you want to continue to get to be a place where we can have public deliberations, where we can all together work to find what is the best path forward. Because otherwise, countries that want to make us weak, want to see us decided, will divide us and we’ll lose that magic that makes our democracies so special,” she said.

A Meta spokesperson told The Front Page that the roll out of community notes will begin in the US, and will improve the program over the next year before looking at expansion to other countries.

“Before rolling out any changes to our fact checking program outside the US, we will carefully consider our legal and regulatory obligations in each country, including New Zealand.”

Listen to the full episode to hear more about Meta’s moves and how it could affect the online atmosphere.

The Front Page is a daily news podcast from the New Zealand Herald, available to listen to every weekday from 5am. The podcast is presented by Chelsea Daniels, an Auckland-based journalist with a background in world news and crime/justice reporting who joined NZME in 2016.

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