According to the US commercial broadcaster NBC News, Facebook’s algorithms contributed to the triggering of internet “social and civic wars,” including one in Poland during the 2019 parliamentary election campaign.
As reported by the Associated Press agency, the British parliamentary committee is in the process of preparing regulations that would regulate the activities of companies owning social media. If they [the regulations] go into effect next year, Silicon Valley giants like Facebook would be fined up to 10 percent of their global revenues for breaching them.
Frances Haugen, a former Facebook manager, testified before a British commission that Facebook’s algorithms are radicalising its users.
“That way someone with centre-left views will be pushed to the far left and someone centre-right will be pushed to the far right,” she admitted.
In September, the Wall Street Journal published a series of articles on Facebook’s malicious algorithms. Its informant was Ms Haugen, who dealt with the fight against disinformation in the company. The publications caused a great stir and provoked a new discussion about the social effects of Facebook and Instagram.
In early October, Ms Haugen testified to the US Senate that the company, along with its boss Mark Zuckerberg, is aware that its algorithms promote content containing hate and disinformation, which has contributed to ethnic crimes, among others, in Burma and Ethiopia. She also added that Instagram harms teenagers by leading them to addiction, lowering their self-esteem and promoting harmful eating habits and anorexia.
According to NBC, in the documents provided by Ms Haugen to the American authorities, there was allegedly a thread about Poland and the 2019 elections.
As the NBC reported, changes made on Facebook in 2019 to “bring friends and family members closer together,” often had the opposite effect. According to the broadcaster, Facebook posts spread easier and faster, “if they included outrage or misinformation, causing an online ‘social-civil war’ abroad in places like Poland.”
It was emphasised that in this way Facebook contributed to a strong polarisation of supporters of the main political parties in Poland before the elections.
As NBC stressed, one of the employees of the social networking platform reportedly wrote that “extremist political parties in various countries enjoyed the way the new algorithm rewarded their provocative strategies on topics such as migration.”