Can’t get you out of my head

“This research is the definition of a bombshell,” said Senator Richard Blumenthal, the chair of the U.S. Senate committee that heard the testimony of Frances Haugen on October 5. Haugen is the former Facebook product manager who leaked documents to The Wall Street Journal and the U.S. Congress showing the extent of the social-media company’s knowledge about harm from their products—including mental-health problems among teenagers and toxic political engagement driven by incendiary, divisive content that keeps users on the site.

As Haugen’s materials demonstrated, Facebook’s executives knowingly misled the public about their actions, and—despite years of mounting pressure following revelations about Russian trolls and bots flooding in 2016 to drive voters toward Donald Trump—the company’s leadership has continued to ignore warnings about the damage Facebook does in the world. And with almost 3 billion users across their platforms, it’s a lot of damage. Can it be fixed?

Sandeep Vaheesan is the legal director at Open Markets Institute in Washington. Vaheesan says part of the issue is in Facebook’s unprecedented size, but the corporation’s behavior is ultimately driven by its business model, which relies on gathering as much data as possible about individual users so it can promise advertisers optimal access to potential customers. And it’s hard to fix a company whose core problem is its business model …

Michael Bluhm: Can this problem be solved?

Sandeep Vaheesan: It can, but it’s not going to be easy. Facebook has to be reconstructed from the ground up if we’re to have a socially beneficial version of it.