A former employee of Facebook Frances Haugen was attended to by British lawmakers about allegations against the tech giant. Haugen, who is popularly known as a whistle-blower is back in news against Facebook algorithms and strategies used on new sign-ups. Her allegations made the governments think about how to regulate Facebook. Haugen was resigned in May of this year from her position at Facebook as chief product officer and she took with her hundreds of internal documents that triggered a series of allegations. She made blame against Tech giant is the reason that harmed the mental health of young people, caused ethnic violence in Ethiopia, and posts on Facebook added fuel to fire that caused January 06th riots in Washington.
Facebook allowed a provocative post to spread which featured a copy of the Quran that triggers violence in Bangladesh. Post is like placing Quran at the knee of the Hindu deity which was deliberate. The post was supposed to incite the mob to attack Hindu temples. Hate spreads like a wildfire in popular social media networks like Facebook. Frances Haugen exposed Facebook with internal documents called Facebook Papers. These papers show how Facebook allows fake news to spread. According to Haugen Facebook is not only hiding the truth but also deceiving the hate speech. She says that Facebook gave priority to anger and hate and the algorithms have been designed in such a manner. Angry emoji was ranked five times higher than one like emoji in Facebook posts.
Facebook gave recommendations at the time new users open his/her account on Facebook. 90% of new users gave approval for Facebook recommendations which were filled with hate speech, fake news, and violent videos. Just before the Delhi riots in 2019, inflammatory content on Facebook spiked by 300 percent. Though Facebook knows all this, it remains silent and puts people's lives at risk. Facebook condemn the allegations of hate speech and defended that it removes 90% of the hate speech but analysts say it is only below 5%. Q3 of 2021-22 Facebook made $29 billion revenue which was 35% more compared to last FY. The company’s daily active users have increased to 3 billion.
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