money Why Frances Haugen wants ‘nutrition labels’ for social media platforms
Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen joins Yahoo Finance's Editor-in-Chief to discuss different ways the government could potentially regulate social media.
Video Transcript
- What about Washington DC, Frances? This is a big question. And you've got both sides of the aisle that are concerned about big tech and Facebook, in particular. And yet they disagree about what the problem is, never mind what the solution is.
FRANCES HAUGEN: One thing is I've been trying to do is kind of shift the conversation because Facebook knows that as long as we think the argument is about censorship-- is it too much censorship? Is it not enough censorship?-- as long as we focus on that, that is the conflict, we will never resolve it. But what Facebook knows is that there's lots of solutions that don't involve content. Or they involve the dynamics of the algorithm. They involve product choices, like should you have a multi-picker that lets you spam out to 10 groups at the same time, the same piece of content?
Facebook knows they have all these solutions that aren't about content. And as long as we're arguing about censorship, we're not going to hold them accountable in these other things. And so the main thing that, I think, there's a point of common ground is people on the left and on the right believe that people have the right to make informed choices. You only really can consent or like voluntarily choose to do something if you have enough information to make that choice.
And so I've been pushing for, what I call, like nutrition labels. The government doesn't tell us what to put in our mouths, but it does say, hey, if you claim this is in your food, it needs to be in your food. And you need to list how much trans fats is in it. And if you'll notice, the government never banned trans fats. But as soon as consumers had that information, it disappeared from all of their products.
We don't have a nutritional label for TikTok. We don't have a nutrition label for Facebook. But the public has a right to have real data, not Facebook artistic data, but like real data on how these platforms work, so they can make choices.
