US politicians pounded Facebook today, accusing CEO Mark Zuckerberg of pushing for higher profits while being cavalier about user safety and they demanded regulators investigate whistleblower accusations that the social media company harms children and stokes divisions.
Coming a day after Facebook and its units including Instagram suffered a major outage, whistleblower Frances Haugen testified in a congressional hearing that "for more than five hours [during the outage] Facebook wasn't used to deepen divides, destabilise democracies and make young girls and women feel bad about their bodies".
In an era when bipartisanship is rare on Capitol Hill, politicians from both parties excoriated the nearly $1 trillion company in a hearing that exemplified the rising anger in Congress with Facebook amid numerous demands for legislative reforms.
As politicians criticised Facebook and Mr Zuckerberg, the company's spokespeople fought back on Twitter, arguing Ms Haugen did not work directly on some of the issues she was being questioned on.
Senate Commerce subcommittee chair Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat, said Facebook knew that its products were addictive, like cigarettes. "Tech now faces that big tobacco jaw-dropping moment of truth," he said.
He called for Mr Zuckerberg to testify before the committee, and for the Securities and Exchange Commission and Federal Trade Commission to investigate the company.
"Our children are the ones who are victims. Teens today looking in the mirror feel doubt and insecurity. Mark Zuckerberg ought to be looking at himself in the mirror," Mr Blumenthal said, adding that Mr Zuckerberg instead was going sailing.
Ms Haugen, a former product manager on Facebook's civic misinformation team who has turned whistleblower, said Facebook has sought to keep its operations confidential.
"Today, no regulator has a menu of solutions for how to fix Facebook, because Facebook didn't want them to know enough about what's causing the problems. Otherwise, there wouldn't have been need for a whistleblower," she said.
The top Republican on the subcommittee, Marsha Blackburn, said that Facebook turned a blind eye to children below age 13 on its sites. "It is clear that Facebook prioritises profit over the well-being of children and all users."
Senator Roger Wicker, another Republican, agreed. "Children of America are hooked on their product. There is cynical knowledge on behalf of these big tech companies that this is true," he said.
Facebook spokesman Kevin McAlister said in an email ahead of the hearing that the company sees protecting its community as more important than maximising profits and said it was not accurate that leaked internal research demonstrated that Instagram was "toxic" for teenage girls.
Ms Haugen revealed she was the one who provided documents used in a Wall Street Journal investigation and a Senate hearing on Instagram's harm to teenage girls.
Last week, Antigone Davis, Facebook's global head of safety, defended the company and said that it was seeking to release additional internal studies in an effort to be more transparent about its findings.
Senator Maria Cantwell, chair of the Commerce Committee, said she would write a letter to Facebook to insist that it not delete documents related to Myanmar's persecuted Muslim minority Rohingya. An aide said she would ask for broader retention of documents.
Ms Haugen said Facebook had also done too little to prevent its site from being used by people planning violence.
Facebook was used by people planning mass killings in Myanmar and the 6 January assault on the US Capitol by supporters of then-president Donald Trump who were determined to throw out the 2020 election results.
Senator Edward Markey, speaking to the absent Mr Zuckerberg (pictured above), said during the hearing: "Your time of invading our privacy, and preying on children is over. Congress will be taking action."
Throughout the hearing politicians lambasted Mr Zuckerberg, who they said was going sailing rather than facing his responsibilities. The CEO this weekend posted a video taken with the company's new smart glasses of his wife in a boat.
Ireland behind on imposing legislation to impose duty of care on companies, says expert
Mary Aiken, Professor of Cyberpsychology at Capitol Technology University in Washington DC, has said politicians are not representing the interests of the children of Ireland and she said it is "not good enough".
Speaking on RTÉ's Drivetime, Prof Aiken said legislation is going through in the UK at the moment, that "will impose a duty of care on companies such as Facebook to actually get their act together, in terms of their responsibility to users" but that Ireland is very much behind on this.
She said she tried for many, many years to effect change in Ireland. Along with Senator Joan Freeman, she worked on the Children's Digital Protection Bill in 2017, and "in 2018, it got all the way through the Seanad and then it was dropped by politicians".
She said that parents and caregivers should be very grateful to Ms Haugen for her Senate testimony today.
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