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Other mouths open for Facebook: The new testimony that “burns” the company

H Francis Haugen opened the Aeolus Bag 15 days ago and it was only a matter of time before others, like her, came forward, denouncing the shadowy and behind-the-scenes processes that prevail on the world’s largest social media.

According to the Washington Post, a young witness accuses Facebook of that “Chooses financial gains over the dispersion of problematic content on the platform”, at a time when the tech giant is being shaken by its revelations whistleblower [σ.σ: αυτός που αποκαλύπτει τα εσωτερικά μυστικά μιας εταιρείας] Haugen.

According to an article in the American newspaper, this second witness is, like Haugen herself, a former Facebook employee, but at the same time member of the internal team responsible for the political integrity of the platform.

The former employee of the company has already submitted a statement to the US Securities and Exchange Commission, citing some very specific comments made in 2017, when the company was deciding how to handle the dispute over the alleged or not Russian involvement in the US presidential 2016 elections.

«Elected officials will grumble»

“It will be a fortune that will pass. Elected officials will grumble. And in a few weeks, they will be doing something else. “In the meantime, we will make money in the basement and everything will be fine,” he said at the time Tucker Bowds, a senior member of Facebook’s communications team, According to the testimony of the (anonymous, as is reasonable and expected) former employee, who drafted and signed his written statement on October 13, exactly one week after Haugen’s testimony before a committee of the US Congress.

In the same way, he follows in the footsteps of Haugen, the 37-year-old computer engineer, also a former Facebook employee, who was described as a “heroine” because she came forward and revealed a bunch of well… hidden secrets and documents about the “dirty” tactics of the media and the founder and its owner, Mark Zuckerberg.

“They choose their profits over our security,” Haugen herself said at the time, after first leaking hundreds of pages of internal documents to the Wall Street Journal that shed further light on the known effects of media use. of social network, such as the psychological problems of teenage girls who are overly exposed to the seemingly “perfect” lives of various influencers on Instagram, a medium that also belongs to Facebook.

According to the Washington Post, the testimony of this new witness to the Hellenic Capital Market Commission confirms that “his executives Facebook regularly undermined efforts to combat misinformation hate speech and other problematic content for fear of angering former President Donald Trump and his political allies and risking losing the attention of users necessary for the company’s dizzying profits. “

“This report was below the level of the Washington Post, which has been publishing articles for the past five years only after researching the merits and finding numerous sources,” she said. Erin McPaik, a Facebook spokeswoman who is not having the best of her day, as it has been embroiled in controversy and has faced accusations in recent years, from content management on its platform, especially during elections, to its economic strategy, which is considered by many governments to be a breach of competition rules.

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