Facebook under fire — will lawmakers now get tough on Big Tech?

The world’s largest social media company is having a rough week.

First, a cascade of technical errors brought down Facebook’s services and made it impossible for billions of users to communicate with each other.

A day later, a former employee presented US lawmakers with tens of thousands of pages of internal researchthat she had copied while working at the company. The files, whistleblower Frances Haugen said during a congressional meeting, showed that Facebook keeps prioritizing growth “at all costs” over efforts to stop hate and harm on its platforms.

The two incidents have pushed the US tech giant, and the question of how to regulate it, back into the spotlight.

And they highlight the two main reasons why Facebook is under fire: its ever-growing market power and the way the company deals with harm caused by its platforms.

“These incidents will rekindle the discussion around breaking up Facebook,” said Julia Reda, of the Berlin-based NGO Gesellschaft für Freiheitsrechte, who served as a member of the European Parliament for the German Pirate Party from 2014 to 2019.

“And this should serve as a wake-up call for people to become more serious with regulating Big Tech,” Reda said.

Making algorithms transparent

Haugen’s testimony, and the files she revealed, provide unprecedented insights into Facebook’s inner workings. They suggest that, repeatedly, warnings about Facebook’s technology fell on deaf ears within the company.

“The company’s leadership has ways to make Facebook and Instagram safer, but it won’t make the necessary changes because they have put their astronomical profits before people,” Haugen said.

She argued that tough regulation is needed. What’s particularly important is that lawmakers demand more transparency into how Facebook’s algorithms decide what content users get to see, she added.

The company has rejected her account, claiming that it has tens of thousands of employees working on keeping its platforms safe. “To suggest we encourage bad content and do nothing is just not true,” said Lena Pietsch, Facebook’s director of policy communications.

Mark Zuckerberg shared his thoughts on his company’s platform.

But US and EU lawmakers said the unprecedented publication of evidence from inside Facebook marks a tipping point.

“The time has come for action — and [Haugen is] the catalyst for that action,” Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar said.

Her call was echoed by Alexandra Geese, a member of the European Parliament for the Green Party in charge of negotiating EU rules for platforms. The European Union is currently working on two sets of laws to curb the market power of Big Tech and better hold tech companies accountable for what is happening on their platforms.

Haugen’s revelations provided evidence for how Facebook “chooses profit over the public good,” Geese told DW. Her account has helped build momentum that “will enable European lawmakers to be more ambitious in the rules they set,” Geese said.

Facebook’s market power

In less than two decades, Facebook has grown from a small startup into one of the world’s most powerful corporations. Everywhere in the world, people today depend on its services to work, communicate and access information.

That is why it made global headlines when, on the eve of Haugen’s testimony, billions of users around the world suddenly were unable to access Facebook’s platform, its messaging services WhatsApp and Messenger, and Instagram.

After six hours, the services gradually went back online. But the damage was done: Businesses had been disconnected from customers. Media organizations had been unable to publish content.

And many users in the Global South, where people often use Facebook’s app to access the internet on their phone, had been de facto cut off from the web.

“A lot of countries in Latin America and Asia are even more reliant on Facebook than we in the Global North are,” said Tyson Barker, who leads the Technology and Global Affairs Program at the German Council on Foreign Relations think tank. “But they are also in a much worse bargaining position when it comes to dealing with Facebook.”

That is why the EU and the US should take the lead in forcing Big Tech giants like Facebook “to disaggregate their services” so that they can continue operating independently in the case of an outage, Barker said.

Two possible trajectories

It is far from certain whether any such thing might happen.

“This could be the breaking point for strong regulation,” said Julian Jaursch, of the German think tank Stiftung Neue Verantwortung. The 2013 revelations by the whistleblower Edward Snowden about global surveillance, for example, spurred a data protection debate that led to tougher privacy laws around the world.

“But it could also go completely the other way and nothing will change substantially,” Jaursch said.

Revelations in 2018 that Cambridge Analytica had mined the data of Facebook users to sway elections from Nigeria to the US had also caused global outrage, he said — “but it did not lead to any sustainable, lasting change.”