Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen has given MPs plenty to think about

Editorial: The company claims that Frances Haugen’s account of the Facebook way of doing business is partial – so it should be transparent about what it believes is missing

Frances Haugen at Westminster on Monday (AFP)

It is greatly to the credit of the parliamentary committee scrutinising the draft Online Safety Bill that it has invited Frances Haugen, the Facebook whistleblower, to give evidence to it.

As the committee chair, Damian Collins says, her firsthand account of life inside Facebook offers an essential insight into what the social media giant can and can’t do to intercept socially damaging material circulating online. Her testimony was as compelling and revelatory as it was during her earlier sessions with the US Congress.

On the fact of it, most of Ms Haugen’s statements lend credence to the generally perceived notion that Facebook lets down its users and wider society by putting profit before people. It is a notion rejected by Mark Zuckerberg. But Ms Haugen was clear in her testimony to the committee: “Anger and hate is the best way to grow on Facebook.”

It is a capitalist organisation, of course, and not a charity and the great mission it set itself, “connecting people”, is a perfectly noble one; but somewhere along the line of building a billions-strong subscriber base it seems to have lost touch with some of the (supposed) idealism that inspired Mr Zuckerberg in the first place.

Such a failure has been dangerously counterproductive, as Facebook has faced calls for it to be broken up, which would destroy its very raison d’etre. It is a curiously myopic pattern of behaviour for the visionary Mr Zuckerberg and his board to be indulging in. Even Facebook itself has called for a global framework for regulation – though perhaps safe in the assumption that such an internationally agreed rulebook is impossible to construct.

In any case, Facebook claims that Ms Haugen’s account of the Facebook way of doing business is partial, in all senses of the term. If so, then it is open to Mr Zuckerberg to come to London, or use his own Facebook platform to give his version of events. More realistically, he could send the man now known to headline writers as “Facebook’s Clegg”. The ex-deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg is hardly a stranger to parliament, and, as a Liberal Democrat, always argued for accountability, transparency and corporate responsibility.

At the moment, though, the Facebook side of the story is going by default, and that is fair neither to the company nor its users and the wider communities and preservation of online liberties that Facebook wishes to serve.

Ms Haugen told the committee that she is sure Mr Zuckerberg is paying attention to what is happening in parliament, and the world was keen to listen to what Ms Haugen and other critics have to say. It’s time for Facebook to face up to its responsibilities.