AGAIN, FACEBOOK HAS ANOTHER WHISTLEBLOWER

 

                                            …Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO

 

But this time, the whistleblower brought internal Facebook documents to the SEC

 

 Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook is once again facing another whistleblower.  Again, it is another former employee that demonstrates Zuckerberg’s determination to ensure Facebook’s dominance.  This is according to interviews with more than a dozen former employees.  His latest focus has come under fire in a series of whistleblower complaints filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) by the former Facebook Product Manager, Frances Haugen.

Haugen references Zuckerberg’s public statements at least 20 times in her SEC complaints, asserting that the CEO’s singular power and unique level of control over Facebook mean he bears ultimate responsibility for a litany of societal harms. Her documents appear to contradict the CEO on a host of issues, including the platform’s impact on children’s mental health, whether its algorithms contribute to polarization and how much hate speech it detects around the world.

For example, Zuckerberg testified last year before Congress that the company removes 94% of the hate speech it finds.  However, Facebook’s own internal documents show that its researchers estimated that the company was removing less than 5% of hate speech on Facebook. In March, Zuckerberg told Congress that it was “not at all clear” that social networks polarize people.  However, Facebook’s own researchers had repeatedly found that they do polarize people.

The documents from Haugen are her disclosures made to the SEC and provided to Congress in a redacted form by Haugen’s legal counsel.  They were obtained and reviewed by a consortium of news organizations, including The Washington Post.

In her congressional testimony, Haugen repeatedly accused Zuckerberg of choosing growth over the public good, an allegation echoed in interviews with a number of former employees.

“The specter of Zuckerberg looms in everything the company does,” said Brian Boland, a former vice president of partnerships and marketing who left in 2020 after coming to believe that the platform was polarizing society. “It is entirely driven by him.”

Zuckerberg, who is 37, founded Facebook 17 years ago in his college dorm room.  He envisioned a new way for classmates to connect with one another. Today, Facebook has become a conglomerate encompassing WhatsApp, Instagram and a separate hardware business.

Zuckerberg is chairman of the board and controls 58% of the company’s voting shares, rendering his power virtually unchecked internally at the company and by the board.

This is an ownership structure that gives a single leader a lock on the board’s decision-making “This is unprecedented at a company of this scale,” said Marc Goldstein, head of U.S. research for the proxy adviser Institutional Shareholder Services. “Facebook at this point is by far the largest company to have all this power concentrated in one person’s hands.”

Facebook has previously fought efforts to hold Zuckerberg personally accountable.  In 2019, as the company was facing a record-breaking $5 billion fine from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for privacy violations related to Cambridge Analytica (CA).  CA is a political consultancy that abused profile data from tens of millions of Facebook users.  Facebook then negotiated to protect Zuckerberg from direct liability.  Internal Facebook briefing materials revealed the tech giant was willing to abandon settlement talks and duke it out in court, if the FTC insisted on pursuing the CEO.

The current chair of the SEC, Gary Gensler, has said he wants to go much harder on white-collar crime.  Experts said Gensler is potentially likely to weigh heavily on the Haugen complaint as he looks toward a new era of corporate accountability.

Zuckerberg “has to be the driver of these decisions,” said Sean McKessy, who is the first Chief of the SEC’s whistleblower office, now representing whistleblowers in private practice at Phillips & Cohen. “This is not a typical public company with checks and balances. This is not a democracy, it’s an authoritarian state. … And although the SEC doesn’t have the strongest track record of holding individuals accountable, I certainly could see this case as being a poster child for doing so.”

In April 2020, Zuckerberg appeared to shoot down or express reservations about researchers’ proposals to cut down on hate speech, nudity, graphic violence and misinformation, according to one of the documents. The pandemic was in its early days and coronavirus-related misinformation was spreading. The researchers proposed a limit to boosting content that will be reshared, because serial “reshares” tended to correlate with more misinformation.  Early tests showed limiting content could reduce coronavirus-related misinformation by up to 38%, according to the document.

While it’s unclear whether the SEC will take the case or pursue action against the CEO personally, the allegations made by the whistleblower represent arguably the most profound challenge to Zuckerberg’s leadership of the most powerful social media company on Earth.  Experts said the SEC, which has the power to seek depositions, fine Zuckerberg and even remove him as chairman, it is likely to dig more deeply into what he knew and when he knew it. Though his direct perspective is rarely reflected in any of the documents, the people who worked with him say his fingerprints are everywhere in them.

When Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) asked Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg whether he felt Facebook is a monopoly in the social media industry, Mark Zuckerberg said “No, he didn’t see Facebook as a Monopoly”, which it basically is in social media.

Over the summer, executives in Facebook’s Washington office heard that Zuckerberg was angry about President Biden charge that coronavirus misinformation on Facebook was “killing people”.  Zuckerberg felt Biden had unfairly targeted the company and he wanted to fight back.  This is according to people who heard a key Zuckerberg adviser, Facebook Vice President for Global Affairs Nick Clegg, express the CEO’s viewpoint.

Today, Mark Zuckerberg is married to a physician, who runs a foundation focused on health issues and had hoped that Facebook’s ability to help people during the pandemic would be legacy-making.  Instead, that plan was going south.

In July, Guy Rosen, Facebook’s vice president for integrity, wrote a blog noting that Facebook had missed its own vaccine goals, and asserting that Facebook wasn’t to blame for the large number of Americans who refused to get vaccinated.

Though Biden later backed off his comment  about “killing people”, but some former executives saw Facebook’s attack on the White House as unnecessary self-sabotage.  An example of the company exercising poor judgment in an effort to please Zuckerberg.

But complaints about that brash action were met with a familiar response, three people have since said: It was meant to please the “audience of one”, and we know who is that one person.

Copyright G. Ater 2021