Viewpoints: Putting Facebook back in human control
By Robin Givhan / The Washington Post
Facebook needs to be less “twitchy.” This digital monster that has taught the culture how to overreact and fly off the handle needs to be tamed. Regulate it. Open it up. Slow it down and make it more human.
“A hard intervention is like taking a piece of content off Facebook, taking a user off Facebook. Soft interventions are about making a slightly different choice: to make the platform less viral, less twitchy,” said Frances Haugen, the former Facebook employee who testified as a whistleblower during a Senate hearing.
Haugen came to offer testimony about the way in which Facebook’s profit strategy makes young people’s lives worse, how it manipulates our understanding of reality and truth, how it seeds divisiveness. She came to Capitol Hill to paint a behind-the-scenes picture of Facebook’s seeming disregard for the havoc it has caused in our civic life and in our personal ones. She’d already brought her narrative and her documents to the Wall Street Journal. She’d sat for an interview with “60 Minutes.” And now on Tuesday morning, she was settled in behind the witness desk in front of a Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation subcommittee;a bland and bureaucratic name for a group that would get an earful about why humanity seems to be imploding.
Tools of attack: During her tenure at Facebook, Haugen was a product manager, someone cooking up algorithms of the sort that Facebook uses to rank stories in its main news feed. Before that, she was employed by Google, Pinterest and Yelp. She has plenty of insight into the ways in which technology that was originally created to delight or to make life more efficient has blindsided users with negative consequences. Pinterest, a kind of digital mood board, stokes envy with its over-the-top depictions of wedding and home renovation projects. Pity the businesses and brands that end up on the third or fourth page of a Google search. Yelp has become a tool for vindictive diners. The cloud of racial inequality and sexism looms over seemingly all of these platforms.
https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/viewpoints-putting-facebook-back-in-human-control/
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