FRANCES HAUGEN: A HEROINE OR A DISGRUNTLED FORMER EMPLOYEE?

ICHEOKU says if her program was not canceled and her team disbanded, would she have come out to make her allegations? For the nearly two years she worked at Facebook and for the same period of time when everything she is now complaining about were going on at Facebook, what did she do and why now? It is very unfortunate that many people keep a blind eye to things which does not directly impact or effect them directly and as long as it remains that way; but will immediately come barreling down once their interest becomes effected. Now, she is being celebrated as a "heroine" who is courageously taking on the big tech, unafraid to go up against such a titan Mark Zuckerberg and his company Facebook.

Although ICHEOKU is not holding any brief for anyone nor maintaining the position that Facebook is not doing something that will give its profitability an undue advantage and edge over the complained safety of the young and the society at large users of the platform. The issue here is whether the whistle blower is a vindictive woman who is merely reacting angrily because her position was eliminated and she no longer have the power and authority which she once had at Facebook. What is her true motive for coming out this hard at Facebook or is there any company in the world which primary motive is not to increase profitability at every other thing's expense. 

She calls herself "an advocate for public oversight of social media" but did not tell us when her advocacy started, whether at the beginning of her career in the tech industry or at the waning days of it prelude to her resignation from Facebook. In fact she actually said as much herself that she "only lost faith in Facebook's commitment to protecting users after Facebook disbanded the civic integrity team" which she was heading, following the conclusion of the 2020 presidential election. This is despite Facebook stating that the disbandment was for efficiency as it merely redistributed the duties and members of the civic team into other areas. So, if the team wasn't disbanded, would Ms Frances Haugen had come out or still be working for Facebook?

Ms Haugen also claimed that the thing she saw at Facebook "over and over again" was that there were conflicts of interest between what was good for the pubic and what was good for Facebook and that Facebook "over and over again" chose to optimize for its own interests, like making more money. So, she saw all the inimical activities going on at Facebook, it's cutthroat competitive edge to be on the top and to make as much money as they could possibly make, yet it took her this late to voice out her concerns and make her observations known to the public. Why not when she first noticed them and what took her this long?

She knew all these as way back as 2018 when she started working at Facebook that their algorithms were changed to prioritize posts with higher user engagement; and that engagements which turns out lies and anger rank off the chart. She said that Facebook knew that if they change the algorithm to make Facebook safer that people will spend less time on Facebook, that people will click less on advertisements on Facebook and that such limited interest to engage will in turn make Facebook less money. What did she do to remedy the situation immediately upon noticing it. Nothing, as she worked and profited and benefitted from Facebook without a care in the world that people are being "destroyed" by Facebook until now. 

There was nothing in her testimony or in any of the Facebook documents which she stole from the company that showed that she worked tirelessly hammering on these alleged misdeeds to force a change in the company's direction. Instead, she unlawfully and illegally copied thousands of pages of Facebook's internal documents, company's work products and internal memos, which are exclusive property of the company, yet she has not been arrested for it. 

Why is she not in jail instead of parading herself at CBS 60 Minutes or in the Congress or is what she did any different from what Wikileaks Chelsea Manning or National Security Agency contract staff Edward Snowden did, for which one of them has already done some time before being pardoned midway and the other is still a fugitive hiding in Russia.

Then she asked people not to hate Facebook because of what she revealed as that will mean that she had failed in her mission and you ask yourself what then was her ultimate goal for so doing if not to isolate Facebook and create a divide between the company and its 2.3 billion users. She wants lawmakers to take action against Facebook, regulate Facebook, in order to hit back at her former employer for the manner they treated her which forced her to resign. In other words, she was just trying to use lawmakers as her unpaid hitmen. She wants the regulation of big tech, period; the same big tech which she benefitted from handsomely, passing through their revolving doors which saw her going through many including Pinterest, Google and Yelp. 

ICHEOKU says is emphatic that social media is what it is or has become because of the far leftist liberals who control it and who are micromanaging public opinion, censoring and caging  opinions which does not meet their benchmark of liberalism and which digresses from their so called "community" set standards. So, any regulation of the social media should be directed and targeted at equalizing the playing field for every opinion, regardless of how divergent and different they might be. 

Any such regulations should strive at this and not to force Facebook to do more censoring as that will smother free speech and diminish its essence. It is true that Facebook cannot control all the contents on its platform, but Facebook can at least try not to selectively pick and choose which content to control, especially when it is conservative viewpoints. 

This dichotomy in censorship of viewpoints is the real danger of social media and not that Facebook is not doing enough to keep the platform safe. Just to add, if investors were misled, it was a purposeful acquiescence caused by failure of due diligence and greed and not as a result of anything which Facebook is doing because what Facebook is doing is to keep such investors happy with huge returns on their investments. 

Also, Mark Zuckerberg and other high level male executives of Facebook are exceptionally even lucky that no allegations of sexual abuse or of a sexual harassment nature was included, otherwise we would be talking about entirely something else. Feminist females are waging an undeclared war and they do not care the length they go to deliver knockout punches at targeted males. Mark Zuckerberg just dodged a potential #MeToo pbullet.