BRUSSELS – The EU rules on digital services (DSA) “can be an opportunity to change the digital world forever, to force platforms to innovate no longer only according to the law of profit and to save our democracies”. So said Frances Haugen, the Facebook whistleblower, during her hearing at the European Parliament’s internal market committee.
During her speech to MEPs, Haugen explained how Facebook “creates divisions in communities and weakens our democracies” and how this is known within the company, which, however, has “deliberately decided not to take internal investigations into account in order to continue putting profit before people’s health and safety”.
According to Haugen, the problem lies mainly in the secrecy with which Facebook is administered, which results in the fact that “no one outside Facebook, not even governments and authorities, know what is really going on inside”. For the authorities, conducting internal investigations at Facebook is impossible, since “access to the data would entail the violation of market secrecy”, the whistleblower explained, “but this leads to a situation in which Facebook is the sole judge of itself and its problems, and this is no longer sustainable”.
Faced with this, democracies must do “what they have always done when the market got out of hand, which is to impose rules”, Haugen explained. “If the DSA is applied in the right way, Europe has the power to change things. I couldn’t be more grateful to the EU for taking this issue seriously, the DSA can be the gold standard of the digital world and inspire other countries, including America, to save our democracies.”
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BRUSSELS – The EU rules on digital services (DSA) “can be an opportunity to change the digital world forever, to force platforms to innovate no longer only according to the law of profit and to save our democracies”. So said Frances Haugen, the Facebook whistleblower, during her hearing at the European Parliament’s internal market committee.
During her speech to MEPs, Haugen explained how Facebook “creates divisions in communities and weakens our democracies” and how this is known within the company, which, however, has “deliberately decided not to take internal investigations into account in order to continue putting profit before people’s health and safety”.
According to Haugen, the problem lies mainly in the secrecy with which Facebook is administered, which results in the fact that “no one outside Facebook, not even governments and authorities, know what is really going on inside”. For the authorities, conducting internal investigations at Facebook is impossible, since “access to the data would entail the violation of market secrecy”, the whistleblower explained, “but this leads to a situation in which Facebook is the sole judge of itself and its problems, and this is no longer sustainable”.
Faced with this, democracies must do “what they have always done when the market got out of hand, which is to impose rules”, Haugen explained. “If the DSA is applied in the right way, Europe has the power to change things. I couldn’t be more grateful to the EU for taking this issue seriously, the DSA can be the gold standard of the digital world and inspire other countries, including America, to save our democracies.”
She hasn’t met the electorate, has she?