Ms Frances Haugen:

I want to be very clear. Facebook never set out to sow discord or to pull us apart. It never designed that. It never thought that society was too stable, so it should pull people apart. No one did that. It faced a business problem that people were producing less and less content over time on Facebook and Instagram, which is a natural course for all social medial platforms. It did studies trying to figure out how it could incentivise and elicit people to produce more content. What it found by experimenting on people - treating them as test subjects and trying different ways of stimulating them to make more content - was that by giving them more likes, comments, re-shares and more engagement incentivised them to produce more content. Unfortunately, when it started promoting optimising for engagement - those reactions - instead of just optimising for how much time someone spent on site, it had a side effect of ending up giving more distribution to more extreme content. This is because the shortest path to a reaction is hatred.

The real question we are examining here is why Facebook did not act when it found out this was happening back in 2018. At this point, it has been four years since this change happened. Yet, it knew almost immediately. Within less than six month, it sent researchers into Europe to talk to political parties and found that across Europe, people knew it changed the algorithm. They said they used to be able to distribute content, such as a White Paper on agricultural policy - things that did not get the most clicks or most comments - and that people did not fight in the comment threads about the agricultural policy. However, that stuff is important. That is what society is built on. Now, when we try to share that, we get no distribution.