Facebook Growth Projects Often Unraveled Safety Work, Haugen Says

By Deepa Seetharaman

Facebook's teams that drive the company's growth often work at cross purposes with the teams responsible for keeping the platform safe, said Frances Haugen, the former Facebook Inc. employee who gathered internal documents showing how Instagram led to depression and anxiety in many teenage girls.

At a Senate hearing Tuesday morning, Ms. Haugen said many initiatives spearheaded by Facebook's "integrity" teams were often "undone by new growth projects that counteract those remedies."

She also said Facebook teams are often too understaffed to adequately deal with the problems at hand, adding that she was on one team that could only handle a third of the cases in its queue.

Facebook has said it has made significant improvements to address harmful content. "To suggest we encourage bad content and do nothing is just not true," Facebook spokesman Andy Stone has said.

But when given the choice, Ms. Haugen said, Facebook leaders often chose a path that preserved profits over the safety of its users. She added this was part of a corporate culture that CEO Mark Zuckerberg built at Facebook. Mr. Zuckerberg has majority voting control and serves as CEO and chairman of Facebook's board, which makes him unusually powerful within Silicon Valley, she said.

"There is no one currently holding Mark accountable but himself," she said.

Write to Deepa Seetharaman at [e-mail]

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

October 05, 2021 12:38 ET (16:38 GMT)

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