October 5, 2021

The Facebook Whistleblower Doesn’t Have the Solution

Revolving-door regulators never made anything better.

Frances Haugen appears before a Senate hearing.Matt McClain-Pool/Getty

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Leaks are generally good. Transparency of powerful institutions is generally good. The person, or people, who provide them are generally doing a noble thing. Frances Haugen, the former Facebook employee who leaked a damning trove of the social media giant’s internal documents, is no exception.

The files that she helped bring to light in the Wall Street Journal show Facebook’s own knowledge and deception about matters that the company’s critics had long suspected. Its applications contributed to teens’ mental health problems—something the company knew but misled Congress about. Facebook said its rules were equally applied but it privately drew special carveouts for high-profile figures. The company rolled back protections that it had put in place after the election, just in time to help the spread of disinformation and violent rhetoric ahead of the January 6 Capitol riot. The list goes on.

During a hearing with members of the Senate Commerce Committee on Tuesday, senators asked Haugen several times for suggestions about what to do. Haugen’s answers included some incredibly weak tea:

  • Establish a Facebook policy “on how to share information and research from inside the company to appropriate oversight bodies like Congress.”
  • Have the company reinstitute “soft interventions that were implemented to protect the 2020 election,” akin to Twitter’s prompt for users to read a link before sharing it.
  • Create a “regulatory home [within the Federal government] where someone like me can do a tour of duty after working at place like this, and have a place to work on things like regulation,” because, as Haugen argued in the hearing, the people who can work on these issues best are those who have been inside the companies.

As Daniel Hanley, an analyst at the left-leaning think-tank Open Markets, pointed out on Twitter, none of these solutions would change the structures that produced Facebook and all of the problems it has created. Indeed, she specifically argued against structural solutions like breaking up Facebook.*

Facebook’s own lobbyists couldn’t have come up with a better answer than the one Haugen proposed about having former Facebook staffers work in a special government unit that would regulate Facebook. This is known as a “revolving door”—a corporate dream and a nightmare for everyone else. 

There’s an entire genre of stories about the problem. Just two weeks ago, the New York Times published a story on how “the biggest accounting firms encourage their top tax lawyers to do stints at the Treasury” to influence policies to benefit accounting firms. Former employees tend to be loyal to the companies they’ve worked for, especially if their old company stands to give them another job after their government work.

If you believe that Facebook is producing significant harm, the solutions that follow should probably be significant as well. As Evan Greer, deputy director of Fight for the Future, told me, rectifying Facebook’s invasive privacy practices could require “a privacy law strong enough to effectively kill Facebook’s current business model.”

“It’s hard to directly regulate algorithms, but Congress can make it illegal for companies like Facebook and YouTube to harvest the massive amount of data they use to fuel those algorithms,” Greer suggested, referring to Haugen’s warnings on how Facebook’s algorithms lead people to harmful content.

In Haugen’s worldview, it doesn’t need to come to that. A few smart people, ones like Haugen who already worked at Facebook, can work within the current system to fix everything they broke. While it would be wise to heed her warnings and revelations, it would not be as wise to heed what she’s advocating.

Correction: This sentence has been updated to correctly attribute Haugen’s position.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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