The journalist who uncovered Facebook’s miseries: “Meta will pay a lot of money, but has …

Just a few weeks after the 2020 elections in the United States, Jeff Horwitz, then a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, received a private message on his LinkedIn account. On the other side, Frances Haugen, mid-level product manager of Facebook’s Civic Integrity Team. “People need to understand what is happening here,” she warned him. Six years after that message, Meta – the parent company of applications like WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook – has agreed to pay 18 billion dollars to settle lawsuits filed by up to 29 U.S. states accusing Mark Zuckerberg’s empire of designing its platforms to hook teenagers, deceiving users about their security measures, improperly collecting data from minors, and above all, knowing the harm they were causing… and hiding it. That’s exactly what was happening there the day Haugen wrote to Horwitz. The agreement was made public last week, will apply in 48 states, and commits Meta to review its controls and minors’ access time to its tools. “It is not up to me to say if it is a fair or good agreement, but I will say that some of the most serious accusations made by the states are not behaviors directly addressed by the
Read More