Elon Musk has been bringing many policy and structural changes. Were they positive? It is contentious. He completed the $44 billion deal in October 2022 after a long delay and a legal battle. When he dethroned the existing CEO and other top-tier executives, Elon Musk ran the entire company with some radical steps. He wanted to see his vision come to reality for “Twitter 2.0”. The billionaire wanted to make the microblogging site “a bedrock of democracy” and make the platform accessible to the general public.
Twitter and its contemporary Meta have been embroiled in several wrongdoings on many instances in the past. Elon Musk, along with two independent journalists, also ran an exposé to tell the behind-the-scenes truth. In 2021, the Product Manager at Facebook on the Civic Misinformation team, Frances Haughen pulled the blanket off. Frances exposed the platform releasing some internal documents which later became a series on the ‘Wall Street Journal’ titled ‘the facebook files’. After Facebook, she is aiming at Twitter led by Elon Musk to make its algorithm public.
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Who Is Frances Haughen, The Facebook Whistleblower?
After buying Twitter, Elon Musk went on a rampage to sack people and ban and reinstate accounts on Twitter. He fired two of his engineers when they disagreed with him. So, it is unclear how much the Tesla owner has lived by his words. Now, the former Product Manager at Facebook, Frances Haughens has challenged him. Haughens is a French native who has studied Electrical and Computer Engineering and she did her MBA from Harvard University.
She specializes in algorithmic product management. The educator has worked for Yelp, Google, and Pinterest before joining Facebook in 2019. She joined the Civic Misinformation team at Facebook as the product manager. When she was recruited, her job was to hunt down misinformation and any issues hampering the democratic values.
But, she came to know that Facebook is thriving on profitability endangering the lives of the users. So, in 2021, she leaked the internal documents at Facebook which contained certain information that exposed them. The Wall Street Journal released those documents in a series titled ‘the facebook files’.
There were certain realities standing naked like how certain elites are favored over the general user. It happens through a program “XCheck”, which has defeated its purpose to take actions against celebrities and known personalities. Instead, it creates an allow list and gives them liberty to flout the community guidelines. After this divulge, Frances is now an advocate promoting transparent and responsible use of social media.
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She Has Asked Elon Musk To Make The Twitter Algorithm Public
The former Product Manager at Facebook has a profitable suggestion to Elon Musk. On January 1st, 2023, Frances Haughens sat down with Chuck Todd. She talked about ‘How social media is shaping politics’ on NBC’s ‘Meet the Press’. In the interview, she asked the new Twitter CEO to open source the platform to gain more profit. After Elon Musk purchased it, the company was delisted from the New York Stock Exchange.
WATCH: Facebook whistleblower @FrancesHaugen calls on @elonmusk to “publish the algorithms.”
“If he wants to have the public square … open source it.” pic.twitter.com/DphkeBYd38
— Meet the Press (@MeetThePress) January 1, 2023
She said, “Open source it. He’d have more help. It’d be cheaper for him. He’d be more profitable. Let’s just start facing the facts and stop pretending they’re some little company in a garage”. Frances hinted that these social media moguls are afraid to take any such steps due to profitability concerns.
She gave an example of Facebook. “Facebook is scared that if we actually had transparency, if we actually had accountability, they would not be a company with 35 percent profit margins. They’d be a company with 15 percent profit margins”.
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