Ms Frances Haugen:

I understand the attraction of wanting to decrease anonymity on platforms like this. I have heard a lot of different people suggest that we should have identification verification for all people on social media platforms. However, one of the important things to remember is that we live in a really diverse world. In most parts of the world, there are not computerised systems where we can verify an ID, where we can say "Here's a picture of an ID, let's make sure that person is the same person.". As long as we live in a world where we cannot actually confirm with any computer method the ID of people, we are going to have a situation where someone who wants to get around any enforcement system will just use a virtual public network, VPN. A VPN is a little pipeline that allows an individual to access the Internet from a different place in the world. People can just pretend that they are coming from one of those places and can get an account that is not traceable. Either we exclude those parts of the world from the system, which is not equitable, or we accept that making sure we know who people are online is extremely difficult. I do not think it is realistically going to happen any time in the future.

The second thing is that platforms actually have a huge amount of information on people and companies like Facebook should have to work with governmental officials who provide things like search warrants. They should be fast and transparent in providing relevant information when a crime has occurred, for example.

There are two sides to this issue. First, it is very difficult to confirm people's ID online and we should not pretend that this is a magic bullet. Second, companies should disclose the information that they do have. They know, for example, where people access things from and they can infer lots of things about people's friends. They should disclose the information they do have when, for example, a warrant is presented and should not stonewall people.