Lawmakers aren't done scrutinizing Facebook about its potential mental health effects on young people.
Haugen has also appeared before Congress twice and testified before the UK Parliament.įollowing The Wall Street Journal's coverage, a consortium of news organizations published a series of stories from the documents, which they called the Facebook Papers, about the social network's failure to police content in developing countries, teens migrating from the platform and Facebook employees' complaints that the social network hadn't done enough ahead of the 2020 US elections. "Facebook, over and over again, chose to optimize for its own interests, like making more money," she told 60 Minutes' Scott Pelley in an October interview.
A whistleblower sets off another wave of concernįacebook's PR nightmares continued to grow after Haugen revealed herself as the whistleblower who copied thousands of pages of documents before leaving the company.įormer Facebook employee and whistleblower Frances Haugen testifies before Congress on Oct. "My hope is that Facebook, instead of taking it personally, that somehow I'm saying Facebook is killing people, that they would do something about the misinformation, the outrageous misinformation about the vaccine," Biden said. More than 3.3 million Americans have used Facebook's vaccine finder tool, the company said at the time.īiden backtracked and clarified that he meant it's vaccine misinformation that's "killing people," not Facebook itself. Tension between Facebook and Biden flared in July when the president accused tech platforms, including the social network, of "killing people" by allowing misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines to spread online.įacebook pushed back against Biden's accusations, noting that the company directed more than 2 billion people to reliable information about COVID-19 and vaccines. President Joe Biden has been one of Facebook's harshest critics. In October, Trump said he's launching a new social network called Truth Social to push back against Big Tech. The Trump ban fueled allegations that Facebook and other social networks were censoring conservative speech, which those companies continue to deny.
In March, US lawmakers pressed Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Jack Dorsey, who was Twitter's CEO at the time and Google CEO Sundar Pichai about the roles their platforms played in the January attacks on the US Capitol. Trump will remain suspended from Facebook until at least 2023, at which point the social network said it "will look to experts to assess whether the risk to public safety has receded." Supporters of President Trump storm the US Capitol.Įvelyn Hockstein/For The Washington Post via Getty ImagesĬiting concerns about inciting more violence after five people died at the riot, Facebook, along with Twitter, Snapchat and Google-owned YouTube, made the unprecedented move to boot Trump from their platforms.įacebook suspended Trump indefinitely, a decision the social network's independent oversight board agreed with. Trump had been pushing unfounded claims on social networks that the 2020 election was stolen from him. 6 riot, during which supporters of President Donald Trump stormed the US Capitol to disrupt Congress' certification of Joe Biden's presidential victory, put social media companies under a harsh light. Here are some of the company's major moments in 2021: Capitol Hill Riot The public uproar didn't stop the company from pushing ahead with efforts to create the metaverse, a virtual environment where people can work, socialize and play games together. Meta, which has 3.6 billion users, says its research is being mischaracterized and points to the more than 40,000 people working on safety and security as evidence it takes these concerns seriously. Fueled by the leaked documents, criticism that the social network puts profits over user safety grew louder in 2021. The company, which recently rebranded under the name Meta, has dealt with nonstop criticism that it doesn't do enough to combat hate speech, misinformation and other offensive content, especially in developing countries.
The testy exchange underscores the lack of trust that lawmakers, as well as society at large, have in the world's largest social network.