Frances Haughen: Why Big Tech Can’t Regulate Itself

Do you agree that for most people, these issues are so large and intractable feeling that most people kind of shrug a little bit in the weirdest way? Because it's not that people will agree it's important.

We don't want to be manipulated.

We don't want fake news.

And yet most people kind of say, well, what am I supposed to do about it? And they go back to Facebook because that's how they connect with their friends.

How do we make this more, I guess, actionable, more present for people? And

we need to also just acknowledge, like, the role, like, if you run a group on Facebook or you run some support organization, like, you need to ask, like, do you want to keep enabling these things? Because I'll give you an example.

I have a very, I have these very rare antibodies called colic glutenin antibodies.

So I have, they bind to your red blood cells when you get under a certain temperature and And they clump together and they cut off blood flow.

And that's part of why I live in Puerto Rico because it allows me to always stay warm.

There are two support groups on the internet.

Both of them are on Facebook.

The only thing I use Facebook for is to access these two support groups, right? And I talk to parents and they'll be like, my school district uses Facebook groups, right? Or I'll talk to college students and they'll say, the only way to get information from the people who run my dorm is there is a Facebook group that I was required to join.

You know, if you see things where mandatory infrastructure is being run through Facebook, you should raise this idea of consent, right? Like, do you really want to be forcing and angering people into systems that very clearly don't care about our well-being? Because there are alternatives, right? Like, you know, Discord is free.

You can do lots of flexibility with it.

It's extendable in lots of different ways.

There's open source alternatives, right? But I think this question of people feeling overwhelmed, I really do worry about, particularly in the conversations about like the end of the world.

I really worry that a lot of the discourse where people are trying to sound the whistle about AI, particularly if you hear enough times the world is going to end and the world doesn't end, people get desensitized to it.

And I worry in some ways with social media is the same thing where people say, you know, I hear that social media does these things, but when I go online, it's just my friends.

And what that ignores is that it might be 50% your friends.

That's actually not the numbers.

Like when Mark Zuckerberg has to testify before Congress, you know, it's like less than 30% your friends and family now.

But the thing that is less obvious is, you know, the question of control.

And I had a really interesting conversation with like two staffers at CNN of all places yesterday.

And one of them was talking about how like she had made a decision to step away from Instagram and yet she kept finding Instagram open on her phone, right? And one of the things I suggested to her was there's an app called OneSec that lets you pick apps where you want to take a pause before you open them.

And when you open the app, it makes you wait and watch a little countdown for 30 seconds And it tells you how many times you've opened that app that day, right? Because part of it is we get into these habits where, you know, we just invisibly open these things because it's like the thing we do when we feel stressed or bored or whatever.