Ms Frances Haugen:

We got to where we are today because Facebook was not transparent. Think about it; we do not let children grade their own homework because humans are humans. Sometimes we need to cut corners. Sometimes we are stressed with other things. Facebook has only had to report publicly its profit and loss position, its expenses and that is what is optimised for. Facebook has lots of small solutions that would have radically reduced things like misinformation or inflammatory content, including things like requiring users to click on a link before resharing content, which Twitter did. Has anyone been censored by that action? Has anyone been oppressed because they had to click on a link before resharing? No, but Facebook chose not to do that because it decreased the amount of content distributed on the system by a very tiny amount - we are talking tenths of 1% here - and that would have decreased profits. We must have mandated transparency. The public must have the right to ask questions and get real, validated data in return on an ongoing basis. Facebook will tell us that they cannot give us this data on a monthly or weekly basis but that is a lie. If they pull the data once, if they write the code once to pull this information, they have systems that allow them to run it every day if they want to. It is basically free. Unless we have mandated, ongoing transparency, there will not be enough eyes looking at these things.

Part of why Twitter is able to find these information operations is that there are literally 10,000 researchers around the world who enjoy looking at these data and who find these security flaws. Unless we have a similar mechanism for Facebook, we will not have a level of public safety that is acceptable.