Whistleblower Haugen to testify as UK scrutinizes Facebook

Former Facebook knowledge scientist turned whistleblower Frances Haugen plans to reply questions Monday from lawmakers within the United Kingdom who’re engaged on laws to rein within the energy of social media firms.
Haugen is ready to seem earlier than a parliamentary committee scrutinizing the British authorities’s draft laws to crack down on dangerous on-line content material, and her feedback might assist lawmakers beef up the brand new guidelines. She’s testifying the identical day Facebook is predicted to launch its newest earnings.
It will likely be her second look earlier than lawmakers after she testified within the US Senate earlier this month in regards to the hazard she says the corporate poses, from harming kids to inciting political violence and fueling misinformation. Haugen cited inner analysis paperwork she secretly copied earlier than leaving her job in Facebook’s civic integrity unit.
She informed US lawmakers that she thinks a federal regulator is required to supervise digital giants like Facebook, one thing that officers in Britain and the European Union are already engaged on.
The UK authorities’s on-line security invoice requires establishing a regulator that might maintain firms to account relating to eradicating dangerous or unlawful content material from their platforms, equivalent to terrorist materials or baby intercourse abuse pictures.
“This is quite a big moment,” Damian Collins, the lawmaker who chairs the committee, mentioned forward of the listening to. “This is a moment, sort of like Cambridge Analytica, but possibly bigger in that I think it provides a real window into the soul of these companies.”
Collins was referring to the 2018 debacle involving data-mining agency Cambridge Analytica, which gathered particulars on as many as 87 million Facebook customers with out their permission.
Haugen is also scheduled to fulfill subsequent month with European Union officers in Brussels, the place the bloc’s government fee is updating its digital rulebook to raised defend web customers by holding on-line firms extra accountable for unlawful or harmful content material.
Under the UK guidelines, anticipated to take impact subsequent yr, Silicon Valley giants face an final penalty of as much as 10% of their world income for any violations. The EU is proposing the same penalty.
The UK committee will likely be hoping to listen to extra from Haugen in regards to the knowledge that tech firms have gathered. Collins mentioned the inner information that Haugen has turned over to U.S. authorities are necessary as a result of it exhibits the form of info that Facebook holds – and what regulators must be asking once they examine these firms.
The committee has already heard from one other Facebook whistleblower, Sophie Zhang, who raised the alarm after discovering proof of on-line political manipulation in international locations equivalent to Honduras and Azerbaijan earlier than she was fired.