Ms Frances Haugen:

That was beautiful. I want to be really clear. I really love social media. I have worked with four social networks at this point. The first time I wrote a programme that went out and read the Internet, it was on a social media site called Friendster a long time ago. I was in Europe when I wrote it. I thank you guys for sponsoring my education.

I want to be really clear. When we have social media, it is about our friends, families and immediate communities and it is not that dangerous. Things that cause these systems to be super dangerous are driven by a profit motive. We could roll back in time to 2008, when we mostly saw content from family and friends. Facebook runs experiments today when it rolls back the clock and gives boosts to content to people to which we are directly connected. This is from people we know. It is for free, and people get less hate speech, less violence and less nudity.

What is the problem then? If we imagine a world where we only get content from family and friends, after 20 or 30 minutes, a person would finish catching up with those family and friends and go on to something else in life. If Facebook wants to keep people on for hours and get more advertising dollars, it needs to find more content. Facebook has begun forcing people into giant groups of 500,000 or 1 million people, and these are the pathways being weaponised, for example, by Russia. Russia has figured out it can bootstrap these groups. It has found hacks to build them very quickly and it forces out content to people.

What can we do to force Facebook back to a system that is more about our family and friends? By requiring the company to disclose ongoing information about the performance of their systems and even those censorship systems, for example, we can begin to make it attractive for them to do some very basic fixes. Let us imagine Alice writes something and Bob, her friend, shares it. If Carol shares it again, it is a friend of a friend. It might land in Dan's newsfeed and now we are beyond friends of friends. If Dan had to copy and paste in order to propagate further - he cannot knee-jerk and hit a share button - that change alone would have the same impact as the entire third-party fact-checking system. Facebook does not do it because it costs a sliver of profit. It may be half a percentage point of profit because there is less content on the system. It would be radically safer and more pleasant but it would be less profitable.

We must require mandatory ongoing reporting of metrics that can be audited by the public so Facebook feels shame when it knows somebody is watching. It should be willing to use these little tricks they already know about and they work for everybody in the world and not just people who speak English. The company will not do this unless it has to report something other than profit and loss.