With his controversial revelations in recent weeks, Former Facebook Employee Frances Haugen Has Mapped Facebook’s ‘Integrity Team’, a theoretically fundamental department of the company, as it is in charge of investigating the role of the social network when it comes to spreading hate speech, hoaxes and all kinds of harmful content for the user.
In fact, in Silicon Valley, the concept of “work in integrity” became generalized as a way of referring to this work precisely as a result of the creation of this team by Zuckerberg’s company in 2016, during the penultimate US presidential elections.
But Haugen’s revelations have also made it possible to understand that much of the team’s work usually falls on deaf ears because its proposals collide with economic interests of the company, an attitude that has caused the frustration and exhaustion of many of the members of this team.
“We have seen, first hand, the terrible things that people do to each other online and […] despite everything, we still believe in the Internet. “(‘Letter from the Founders’, Integrity Institute)
Another frustrated member is Jeff Allen: In late 2019, shortly before leaving the company, this data scientist published his latest report for Facebook, showing that three years after detecting the presence of relevant ‘troll farms’ operating from Kosovo and Macedonia, not only had they not been expelled from the network, but its impact on the network had grown exponentially even dwarfing that of Walmart.
Establish a “new science”, raise open debates
After spending a year working for the Democratic National Committee, Allen went to work on a new project alongside Sahar Massachi, another former Facebook employee assigned to the Integrity team: for the past 10 months, they have been quietly creating an independent organization. with which they trust in power help all employees working in this new field of ‘technological integrity’, even beyond Facebook.
This new institution, created under the name of Integrity Institute, will have the mission of building “a network of integrity professionals” who work or have worked for large technology companies, in order to generate a public consensus that responds to the ethical and technical doubts that until now they had tried to answer separately and behind closed doors, and that he is able to advise regulators and the media as well.
“If social media companies are the new cities, we are the new urban planners.” (‘Letter from the Founders’, Integrity Institute)
They don’t define themselves as ‘insider whistleblowers’ in the style of Frances Haugen – “and of course we are not going to violate our nondisclosure agreements” – but they are eager to capitalize on the sudden public interest in this field (this “emerging science”, as they designate it themselves) that has generated the complaint of his former colleague.
Samidh Chakrabarti, a former head of Facebook’s civic integrity team and a longtime fierce critic of the company, has publicly endorsed the initiative to create the Integrity Institute and has encouraged industry leaders to collaborate with the same “to address the challenges at the intersection of technology and society.” At the moment they already have collaborators who have carried out this work in nine different platforms.