Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 23 February 2022

Joint Committee on Tourism, Culture, Arts, Sport And Media

Online Disinformation and Media Literacy: Ms Frances Haugen

Ms Frances Haugen:

There are unquestionably things that we do not know about. I am one person. Let us think for a moment about the things that I learned about how Facebook is operating. I just did a few searches. I am one person, and I was able to capture a lot, but I was only able to capture a tiny sliver. The fact that Facebook can operate at the scale that it does, that it can touch the lives of 3.1 billion people and be completely opaque to us is unacceptable. We are going to keep having whistleblowers come forward from Facebook until we have managed to get greater transparency. There are not whistleblowers coming out of Apple. That is because Apple is radically more transparent. People can take their devices apart. They can measure the pollution coming out of their factories. Apple has much less incentive to lie than Facebook does, because those in Facebook know that no one can catch them in that lie because they are the only ones that have the data.

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