It follows them into their bedrooms. the last thing they see before they go to bed is someone being cruel or the first thing they see in the morning is someone being cruel to them. kids are learning their own friends, people who care about them are cruel to them. i would like to emphasize one of the documents on problematic use examined the rates of problematic use by age and that peaked with 14-year-olds, it s just like cigarettes. teenagers don t have good self-regulation. they say explicitly i feel bad when i use instagram and yet i can t stop. you can hear there why she is an absolute nightmare for facebook, and on top of all of that, she s got thousands of their internal documents, and she was with the company until as recently as may. the company facebook is pushing back very very hard putting out a statement in the past hour. i ll read you some of that. they re really trying to down play this whistleblower, the work she did. they say she worked for the company for two years, n
Reports, never attended a decision point meeting with c level executives, and testified more than six times, in the subject matter of question. we don t agree with her characterization of the many issues she testified about. but so much of what she testified about is the truth, right, i mean, a lot of what she s saying about how these algorithms are designed, and what facebook and instagram is doing and what is happening on their platforms, we ve documented, to our reporting, through reporting elsewhere, and through other experts who follow this sort of thing, so this is a very big issue for facebook, and finally, i will say this is not today is unlikely to be the last time that frances haugen is up here on capitol hill. senator blumenthal suggested they might invite her back to speak more about child safety, and we heard from adam schiff yesterday saying her talk about what facebook did between the election and insurrection she may appear before the january 6th committee as well.
Us live from capitol hill. so i mean, she just put to words what many people have been fearing for years about the algorithm of facebook, that it does much more harm than good, so where are we and what can lawmakers actually do? reporter: well, lawmakers can legislate to regulate and there s certainly a lot of indication from senators on both sides of the aisle who were at that hearing today that they would be willing to do that, that this seems like a bipartisan issue, and a lot of it is due to how compelling this whistleblower s testimony was. have a listen. facebook knows that it s amplification algorithms, like engagement based ranking on instagram can lead children from innocuous topics like healthy recipe, i think all of us could eat a little more healthy, all the way from something like healthy recipes to anorexia promoted content. the bullying follows them home.
Have been a part of. i ve frankly never seen such an effort to prepare for an election. why did you dissolve the civic integrity department which worked on misinformation before january 6th? we didn t dissolve that team. what we did was build a bigger team that that team became a part of, and in part that s because over the last few years with covid, with the election, with other matters that we had teams working on individually, we were learning about things like how to use informational labels on content, how to build informational centers, and we wanted to be able to leverage the things that these teens were learning and put them all on one team to work together. we have expanded the number of people working on these issues. why doesn t facebook allow more transparency to allow more regulators to see how the algorithms function? we are the most transparent company in the industry. we started the practice of
Now, we need to do better for those who are having a bad experience, but that s exactly why we do this kind of research. we wouldn t ask these tough questions if we didn t care. we re asking because we care. on a bigger issue, what about democracy, does facebook take any responsibility for what happened on january 6th since it allowed the big election lie, propagated by donald trump to proliferate on the site. the responsibility for january 6th, i can t be more closure about this, than to say the responsibility for january 6th lies with those who broke the law, and those in politics and elsewhere who incited them, and the work that we did both before the election and all the way through january 6th, partnering with academics and researchers, working closely with law enforcement and authorities to understand what the risks were, and to put safety measures in place that started before the election, well before the election, and continued through march, that was work that i m very pro