There are many reasons why Facebook executive Nick Clegg may have found himself on clean-up duty over the weekend, chief among them the damning disclosures of Frances Haugen, the former-product-manager-turned-whistleblower who has armed news outlets and members of Congress with a barrage of internal documents from her time with the company. Testifying last week, Haugen urged lawmakers to impose regulations on the social media giant—just as the government did with tobacco companies. “I believe Facebook’s products harm children, stoke division and weaken our democracy,” she told a Senate subcommittee, citing the January 6 Capitol attack as an insurrection aided by Facebook’s unwillingness to crack down on misinformation and hate speech.
That was apparently not a topic Clegg wanted to address during Sunday’s media blitz, The Guardian reports, as he dodged questions about whether Facebook contributed to the attack by allowing pro-Trump election lies to proliferate and tried to put the onus on individual actors. “Given that we have thousands of algorithms and millions of people using it, I can’t give you a yes or no answer to individual personalized feeds each person uses,” Clegg, Facebook’s vice president of policy and global affairs, told CNN’s State of the Union. He also cited Facebook’s algorithm during a press hit on ABC’s This Week, in which he said “we give users the ability to override the algorithm, to compose their own newsfeed” and “we want to give users more control.”
Clegg laid out other talking points pertaining to how Facebook is trying “to make ourselves ever more transparent, so people can hold us to account,” as he told ABC, and talked up new tools helping parents to “supervise what their teens are doing online.” On NBC’s Meet the Press, Clegg mostly seemed to see the ball in Congress’ court, as he called on legislators to intervene. “I don’t think anyone wants a private company to adjudicate on these difficult trade-offs between free expression on one hand and moderating or removing content on the other” and “only lawmakers can create a digital regulator,” he told the outlet, while insisting the stance is not “a substitution of our responsibilities.” Senator Amy Klobuchar—among Congress’ most vocal Big Tech critics—told CNN she was grateful that Clegg “is willing to talk about things but I believe the time for conversation is done, the time for action is now.” She also suggested that it has thus far been just that—talk—from leaders such as Clegg. “If they’re willing to sign on I’m all for it, but so far we haven’t seen that.”
Facebook has also embarked on a sort of internal damage-control tour since Haugen went public, with “several corporate vice presidents” holding “live internal events with employees” on topics such as “what the company understands about polarization” and “how executives were keeping the platform safe,” the New York Times reports. Facebook’s increased concern was laid bare in talking-point memos, distributed by executives to employees, on how staff should respond when they are “asked questions about recent events by friends and family,” according to the Times. The list of talking points reportedly included a denial that the company prioritizes profit and growth above people’s safety—a focal point of Haugen’s testimony. “The company’s leadership knows how to make Facebook and Instagram safer, but won’t make the necessary changes because they have put their astronomical profits before people,” she said.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg himself has been among those trying to downplay the testimony’s impact on the company, which came the same week that it was rocked by an outage that made Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp globally inaccessible for more than five hours. The stock, as Axios’ Sara Fischer pointed out, is still floundering amid the whistleblower scandal, a kind of “prolonged dip” that she said she had never seen the company experience in response to political fallout before. The turmoil, she told CNN’s Reliable Sources, is seemingly “causing a material impact on its business.” During a question-and-answer session with workers last week, Zuckerberg reportedly argued that it’s “pretty easy to debunk” some of Haugen’s accusations about polarization, dismissing Haugen’s assertions as a mischaracterization of Facebook’s research—a now-familiar line of messaging from Facebook executives in recent days. “We care deeply about issues like safety and well-being and mental health,” he told staff, which is why “it’s really hard and disheartening to see” reporting “that just misrepresents our work and takes that out of context and then uses that to tell narratives that are false about our motives.”
Employees are reportedly split when it comes to Haugen, with some expressing skepticism about her motivation to leak and technical qualifications. “She didn’t know how basic stacks worked,” one Facebook engineer wrote in an internal message reported by the Times, in which he argued Haugen’s testimony should be disqualified. Others appeared to see the fallout as a long time coming, with one person saying in an internal message that Haugen was “saying things that many people here have been saying for years'' and another calling her testimony a “wake-up call” for the company. One worker referred to her as a “hero.”
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