Facebook is ‘unquestionably making hate worse’, says whistleblower Frances Haugen – as it happened

This is from the Institute for Fiscal Studies thinktank on the increase to the “national living wage” announced today.

Back in the committee on the draft online safety bill, Frances Haugen is asked about fake accounts.

She says Facebook is reasonably good at spotting bots.

But she says there are also manually driven fake accounts. She says this is a cottage industry in places like Pakistan or parts of Africa. She says children are paid $1 to play with an account. After a month it passes Facebook’s scutiny, and it looks like a human account because it is a human account. After that it can be sold.

She says one study of 800,000 connectivity accounts found that 100,000 of them were manually driven fake accounts like this.

The hearing is now over.

Frances Haugen tells the draft online safety bill committee that she is concerned about Facebook’s plans for its own end-to-end encryption, because we do not know what they are proposing.

She says if people think they are using end-to-end encryption, but if it is not the same as open source end-to-end encryption, then people’s lives could be at risk.

Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, has confirmed in a call with Boris Johnson today that he won’t be attending Cop26, No 10 said. In its readout of the conversation it said:

President Putin expressed his regret that he would not be able attend the Cop26 summit in person in the light of the coronavirus situation in Russia.

Johnson also told Putin in the course of the call, which covered a series of issues, that “the UK’s current relationship with Russia is not the one we want”.

Back in the draft online safety bill hearing, Frances Haugen says that if Facebook can address the problems she has highlighted, in 10 years’ time it will be a more profitable and successful company.

Back in the draft online safety bill hearing, Frances Haugen says she thinks a duty of care would be really important. Facebook has been allowed for too long to do its own thing, she says.

She says, in conflicts of interest, Facebook should align itself with the public good. And it should not lie to the public. Facebook has failed on both counts, she says. She says it needs better oversight.

Turning away from the Frances Haugen hearing for a moment, my colleague Jessica Elgot says Sir Lindsay Hoyle, the Commons Speaker, is furious about the extent to which the Treasury has been pre-briefing budget stories ahead of the delivery of the budget on Wednesday.

In truth, for many years now the Treasury has been briefing budget stories to the media in the days ahead of the actual budget. It is an arrangement which means the less important measures get more coverage than they would if everything dropped for the first time on Wednesday.

But this year the Treasury does seem to have pre-briefing a lot more than usual. And it has been doing it more formally too, press releasing all its announcements, instead of just briefing them informally to select outlets, as sometimes happened in the past.

Q: Do you think this bill is keeping Mark Zuckerberg awake at night?

Haugen says she is incredible proud of what the UK is doing, in that it is trying to regulate social media. She says the UK has a track record of leading on policy. She says she is sure Zuckerberg is paying attention.

Haugen says people want to pay for high-quality news. And 18-year-olds have one of the highest rates of subscribing, she says.

She says any blogger should not necessarily be treated as providing high-quality news.

She says any system relying on AI to identify what counts as high-quality news will fail. She says the solution is to slow the process down and let humans choose.