A new whistleblower accuses Facebook of putting profits before moderation of problematic content, according to the Washington Post, as the social media giant struggles to extricate itself from the scandal caused by the revelations of its former engineer Frances Haugen.
Read also Facebook's whistleblower comes out of the shadows
According to an article in the American daily published on Friday, this second whistleblower is also a former member of the Facebook team in charge of the platform's civic integrity, who made a statement to the SEC, the stock exchange authority. . In this document, the former employee of the group recounts in particular comments made in 2017, when the company was deciding the best way to manage the controversy linked to Russia's interference in the 2016 American presidential election via its platform.
“It will be a flash in the pan. Elected officials will moan. And within a few weeks, they will have moved on. In the meantime we print money in the basement and everything is fine, ”
said Tucker Bounds, a member of the Facebook communications team.
The second whistleblower signed his statement on October 13, a week after Frances Haugen's resounding testimony before the US Congress.
This former Facebook computer scientist, described as a
"heroine"
by a Democratic senator, repeated that the leaders of the Californian group, Mark Zuckerberg at the head,
"finance their profits with our safety"
.
She had previously leaked to the
Wall Street Journal
internal documents that shed new light on known abuses of social networks, such as the psychological problems of teenage girls overexposed to the apparently "perfect" lives and bodies of influencers on Instagram.
Accusation against managers
According to
the Washington Post
, the SEC statement of this new person assures that Facebook managers regularly undermined efforts to fight disinformation, hate speech and other problematic content for fear of angering the former president American Donald Trump and his political allies, and so as not to risk losing the attention of users, essential to his voluminous profits.
Asked by AFP, Erin McPike, a spokesperson for Facebook, said the article was
"below the standards of the
Washington Post
, which for the past five years has only written after investigating the merits and finding multiple sources. ”
The Californian firm has been chaining up controversies for years, from its moderation of content, especially during election time, to its economic strategy, perceived as infringing the rules of competition by many governments.
