Frances Haugen wants to devote herself to educating young people on social networks, she confides in an interview with AFP after a tour of the capitals of Europe where she fought to denounce her former Facebook employer.
"Continue to fight"
"
I want to continue to fight
" so that Facebook modifies its practices of hyper-amplification of harmful content, explains the whistleblower in a large Parisian hotel, between two meetings of a timed schedule and at the eve of returning to the United States. "
I want to take a tour of the universities in the first quarter
" and "
give young people the tools
" to spot the dangerous effects of social networks, said this young blonde woman determined, with a well-honed speech.
After slamming the door of Facebook in May, she gradually transmitted thousands of internal documents collected from the giant that she accuses of not protecting its users.
She abruptly went from shadows to light this fall with damning and high-profile testimony in the U.S. Congress against her former employer.
Read alsoFrances Haugen, the whistleblower who shakes Facebook
The mathematician and data specialist now wants to build a “
consortium
” of independent researchers and specialists to build social network simulators in the laboratory.
“
It's on my Thanksgiving list
” - Americans' traditional holiday next week - to work on this project, she smiles.
These free software simulators would allow researchers and students to conduct experiments on the virality of content.
Sound financial investment
With simulators, students and researchers in algorithms and data science will be able to "
experiment and say ah, it's interesting, here's how we can stop the dissemination of bad content in the network,
" she explains.
Facing Facebook, Frances Haugen ensures to pursue a "
long-term
" action.
"
Maybe it will take two years, maybe it will take five years,
" for the social network to finally be accountable, she warns.
Read alsoFaced with the French Parliament, Frances Haugen wants to force Facebook to be transparent
The young engineer, who has surrounded herself with a team of communications advisers, has acquired her financial independence thanks to judicious financial investments.
“
I saw the Covid crisis happen.
I am a data and network specialist, I saw that the crisis was going to be serious ... and I played down
"the stock market"
just before
"their fall, says the whistleblower.
Part of the profits made were reinvested in cryptocurrencies, which broke new records.
“
Even if I don't go back to paid work, I can use the math and probably make a living just from the markets,
” she says.
Frances Haugen's fight is not to refine Facebook moderation techniques or to seek to better discern good and bad content.
It is rather to put an end to the hyper-amplification of content, by forcing the Californian giant to reveal all its data on the subject.
“
If Facebook was forced to show what is wrong, then it would be forced to make changes,
” she repeats.
Slow down the distribution of content
For her, the social network must take on a human scale, for example by complicating the infinite redistribution of content.
Forcing a Facebook user to do a voluntary act - copy paste, for example - to repost content that has already been shared twice before arriving home "
could have as much of an effect on disinformation as the entire verification program. information
”(fact-checking) of Facebook, she assures.
Facebook could also seek to promote less the formation of groups with millions of subscribers, which it described as a “
variant factory
” during its hearing in the National Assembly.
Read alsoFacebook: what to remember from the hearing of Frances Haugen at the National Assembly
“
Take a group of a million people or five million people, which produces 1,000 pieces of content every day.
If the algorithm has to choose three of these contents to broadcast them in the news feeds, it will usually be the most extreme,
”because these are the ones that provoke the most reactions, she regrets.
And the whistleblower to warn about the “
metavers
”, the parallel digital universe where Facebook would like to embark the population.
If people spend their time in a virtual world where they have “
better clothes, a smarter hairstyle and a nicer apartment
” than in reality, what effect will it have on their sanity, ask? she does.
Read alsoFacebook: "Frances Haugen reminds us of the need to protect whistleblowers"
And what about "
incentives to stay in your virtual reality headset for longer?"
".
"
It is not in five years that we must ask the question, it is in three months
", warns the public enemy number one of Facebook.
