Ms Frances Haugen:

I have talked to people who have worked on the safety systems across the company.

We are talking not only about civic integrity, which was the area in which I worked, but also about the integrity of groups, pages and searches. One of the things we must remember is that the way the incentives are aligned now, the only numbers that have public accountability are profit and loss. Those are the only things Facebook must mandatorily report in the United States. Facebook has shown that for things such as its transparency centre, it selectively reports information, and I can answer questions about this, to paint a picture of the company that has little relation to it. When we think about incentives, the people inside the company who find these problems were a part of the reason I came forward. There are very kind and conscientious people working at Facebook who have no space to operate. When they find these patterns and raise them, they might have to spend three or six months hammering on the doors to get anyone to pay attention. When they do that, they can be labelled as squeaky wheels. They are complaining and are not team players. Unless we have mandatory transparency, there will not be a countervailing force to profit and loss that gives space to these people to operate. We want to create a system of incentives whereby if someone sees a problem with, for example, neo-Nazi groups, as we are recommending, it is obvious and immediate that it needs to be escalated. Today that is seen as a cost centre. It is someone who is complaining and perhaps even exposing the company to risk. Mandatory transparency makes it clear that we are watching and encourages the company to be creative and find solutions. That is what good regulation does. It helps to pulls the centre of mass back towards the company.