Ms Frances Haugen:

It is important to differentiate between changes Facebook made to its product before 2016 and changes it made to its main prioritisation system, which puts together the newsfeed. The latter happened in late 2017 and into 2018. Before the US election of 2016, there were other problems with the system. For example, it was found then that a huge proportion of people who joined neo-Nazi groups in Germany joined them because Facebook recommended those groups to the people. Sixty-five percent of people who had joined neo-Nazi groups joined them because Facebook stated those groups had really excited people who really engaged a lot with Facebook and that they might like them too. Those kinds of things were happening before 2016. They unquestionably influenced politics around those times. However, we have found since then that Facebook did not invest enough in safety systems and researchers who were asking these questions. That is part of why we need to have mandatory risk assessments that do not just involve the company, because it is not going to see things it needs to see, but that also involve bodies such as NGOs. That was before 2016.

In 2018, Facebook changed from focusing on how long it could keep you on Facebook to meaningful social interactions, where meaningful could involve hate speech or bullying. It really just meant the question of whether Facebook could optimise for reactions. Facebook, which had researchers in Europe preparing for the EU elections, identified within six months of the change that its systems were rewarding angry, partisan, divisive content over content that looked for reconciliation or a common path forward.

Facebook has also known that advertisements are equally a problem and that a high-quality political advertisement is one that gets reactions. As a result, extreme, polarising, divisive advertisements can be five to ten times cheaper than compassionate or empathetic ones. We need to ask questions such as whether we want to subsidise angry, divisive content when we know we cannot have a democracy when we are partial towards division over reconciliation.