regulates how companies trade. can her complaint alone to the s.e.c. bring about any meaningful change? i mean, as far as an investigation by the s.e.c. goes, we don t know if the s.e.c. took that up yet but it s an interesting claim that essentially facebook has hid material information that could affect the performance of the business. that s the central claim. but what she has done with her testimony in congress is she is sort of awakened a new conversation where the focus on facebook has been on all this dangerous and toxic speech that spews across its platforms. and what she s done is retrained the focus from the actual speech and more towards the systems. she is a ranking specialist for algorithms behind the news feed and spoke with a lot of confidence and a lot of substance about how the systems of facebook work. and i was really surprised to see members of congress engage in a way where they showed they have caught up, they understand also what s at stake and what kind of a c
mark. reporter: zuckerberg s response, a deflection. if we wanted to ignore research y would we create an industry-leading program to understand these important issues in the first place? we are the most transparent company in the industry. reporter: but the company has been cherry picking what information it discloses. just a few weeks ago it released a report of the most popular links on its website during the second quarter of this year touting itself as the most transparent platform on the internet. as for its first quarter report, turns out facebook didn t release it because one of the top links between january and march of this year was an anti-vaccine article. executives never shared that transparency report with the public because of concerns that would look bad for the company, according to the new york times. i do not believe facebook as is currently structured has the capablity to stop vaccine misinformation. reporter: haugen is calling on the federal government
safe content. and that occurs with content moderation decisions related to political leaders. and we have that in the book where he has prioritized allowing donald trump to spread misinformation about the vaccines and also to spread violent rhetoric or actually rhetoric that encourages racism. and mark zuckerberg was behind many of these decisions. this is the data facebook is not acknowledging in its responses. take a listen. we ve seen escalating rates of suicide among teenagers. there s a swath of research that supports the idea that usage of social media amplifies the risk ff these mental health harms. right now this hearing is helping illuminate it. and facebook s own research shows that. say that again. and facebook s own research shoess that. facebook s own research shows that. the whistleblower gave her data to the s.e.c., the securities and exchange commission, which
in our tech lead, facebook s ceo mark zuckerberg s new lengthy reaction to the whistleblower s damning accusations that the company is purposely allowing hate to fester. and purposely steering teenage girls toward self-hate. all of it for profit. zuckerberg s statement touts facebook s strides and transparency and research but as donie o sullivan reports, zuckerberg avoids the most troubling parts of the whistleblower s revelations. left alone, facebook will continue to make choices that go against the common good. reporter: mark zuckerberg fights back after the blistering testimony of his former employee frances haugen who alleged the social media giant is knowingly hurting its users and the country. the facebook ceo posting a 1300-word response claiming at the heart of these accusations is this idea that we prioritize profit over safety and
our leadership in this company, including mark zuckerberg, have called for this regulation because we think these are important decisions we shouldn t be deciding for ourselves. reporter: but, of course, jake, facebook might have a very different idea than frances haugen of what that regulation should look like. but, jake, that zuckerberg response, oh, boy, she really got under his skin. donie, thanks so much. let s bring in cecilia. she covers technology for the new york times. we ve had her on the show before. she co-authored an ugly truth: inside facebook s battle for domination. good to see you. zuckerberg, not surprisingly, took issue with the whistleblower s entire testimony. not accepting the premise but i d like to ask you about this. the basic premise of the whistleblower and all previous whistleblowers is that facebook values profits over even basic decency. when there s a decision to make, when the algorithms are spearing