san francisco Next year the US will elect its president. Frances Haugen warns that artificial intelligence (AI) will turn out to be a powerful tool for disinformation and the targeted influencing of voters. “The dangers are enormous,” Haugen told the Handelsblatt. AI makes it possible to spread false information in unprecedented dimensions.
Haugen became known as a Facebook whistleblower, a person who uses her experiences within an organization to reveal the downsides of the organization. In 2021 she had addressed the public with warning words. After two years as a product manager at the social network Facebook, she left the company.
However, she had taken 22,000 internal documents with her and based on this information raised the accusation that Facebook was deliberately putting profit interests above the physical and psychological well-being of its users. “Facebook knew the platform was harming people,” Haugen said.
She testified before the US Congress and spoke before the European Union Parliament. She also closely accompanied legislative projects that impose stricter rules on social networks. In Europe, efforts culminated in the so-called law for digital services.
Haugen has now summarized the story behind the revelations and her own life in a book. In “The Truth About Facebook”, which will be published on Tuesday in the USA and other countries such as Germany, she describes her career from the start at the world’s largest search engine operator Google in 2006, with intermediate stations at the platforms Yelp and Pinterest to her entry Facebook after. She describes how, from her point of view, Facebook has not yet taken responsibility for the negative effects of the platform.
AI makes mass fake news possible
Artificial intelligence has the potential to reveal the downsides of social networks again, Haugen warned. “Critics are currently drawing horror scenarios in which artificial intelligence ends in a scenario of an overpowering terminator who wants to eradicate humanity.” The great danger is not a distant future scenario. Artificial intelligence is already able to influence millions of people with false information.
Over the past few years there have been repeated attempts to influence elections by means of targeted false information on networks such as Facebook. But these campaigns were ultimately limited. “There’s just a limited number of people in front of keyboards who can write misinformation,” said Haugen.
AI change the situation. New AI tools could produce text that sounds as good as human words. This would allow millions of targeted misinformation to be tailored to individual people. “This will lead to entirely new types of hidden influence campaigns,” says Haugen.
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Haugen is not alone with these worries. The US think tank Brookings has conducted several studies into the possible effects of AI on elections and democracy as a whole. “You no longer have to be a programmer or a video wizard to create text, images, videos or programs. You don’t necessarily have to work for a troll farm to harm the opposition,” wrote Brookings analyst Darrell M. West. “New technologies allow people to monetize dissatisfaction and monetize other people’s fears, worries or anger.”
Danger for US presidential election
AJ Nash of the cybersecurity company ZeroFox also warns that social networks are particularly easy to misuse for campaigns using false information. Above all, the use of artificially created audio and video formats represents new possibilities.
For example, the Republican Party responded within hours to incumbent US President Joe Biden’s announcement that he would run for office next year. The video, which shows a country in chaos after Biden’s re-election, was created with the help of AI. The video gives a foretaste of a new pace in the election campaign, said analyst West.
The Facebook whistleblower was also a guest at the European Parliament in Brussels after her leaks.
(Photo: imago images/Belga)
Large-scale targeted disinformation could affect millions of people, Democratic Rep. Yvette Clarke warned the Associated Press news agency. “People can be fooled, and it only takes a split second. People are busy with their lives and don’t have the time to check every piece of information.”
Urgent action must be taken now, Haugen also demands. The dangers of an escalation during the presidential elections next year are enormous. Since the takeover of the short message service Twitter, Elon Musk has laid off a large part of the workforce. “There’s hardly anyone left there to take care of the safety of the platform,” Haugen complained. Nevertheless, Twitter has hardly felt any sanctions from the authorities.
The new strategy of Twitter and Elon Musk also affects other networks such as Facebook. “I’m very concerned about the 2024 election. Facebook has fired many of the people who were still protecting the platform in the 2020 election year.”
Meta price up more than 110 percent year-to-date
The founder and head of the Facebook group Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, had declared 2023 the “Year of Efficiency”. In several waves of layoffs, Zuckerberg announced that more than 20,000 jobs would be cut at the company. However, the group had hired many new employees since 2020. At the end of 2020, Meta had around 59,000 employees worldwide. Two years later there were around 86,000 employees.
>> Read here: Inside Meta: The Deep Fall of the Facebook Group
The development was welcomed on the stock exchange. The Meta share has increased by more than 110 percent since the beginning of the year. The company is currently valued at nearly $700 billion.
Evaluating big tech platforms is a source of fundamental difficulties for Haugen. “Part of the problem is that while we let companies publish figures on their profit or loss, we don’t let them publish figures on their impact on society,” Haugen said.
The Meta Group is itself a driving force behind new tools based on AI. For a few weeks now, advertisers have been able to have AI generate images for ads or entire advertising texts. “Small and medium-sized companies will benefit from this,” said CEO Zuckerberg.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has repeatedly promised to make the platform more secure.
(Photo: AP)
What makes Haugen’s criticism so powerful is her own career. It is an ideal example of what Silicon Valley is all about. In her book, she described her life in detail for the first time. Because of her excellent performance at school, she made it into the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering, one of the most prestigious programs in the USA. With a computer science degree, she then started directly at Google. There she worked, among other things, on digitizing the books of this world in a huge database. At the same time, she completed a master’s degree at Harvard Business School.
Book describes Haugen’s path to becoming a whistleblower
In her book, she describes how she deliberately took up a position at Facebook in order to make the network more secure. However, she then found an organization that did not want to slow down rapid growth and economic success for greater security.
To date, platforms such as Facebook and Instagram have operated with the aim of retaining users for as long as possible. “Every minute they keep the user online is another minute they can see an ad, click on it, and make them money,” Haugen writes. It is accepted that this goal “is achieved, among other things, by the user being pushed to ever more extreme content”.
She only touched on the topic of artificial intelligence in her book. To a large extent, she repeated the criticism of Facebook that she had repeated repeatedly over the past two years.
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The Meta Group, and in particular CEO Mark Zuckerberg, had repeatedly promised to make the platform more secure. Meta wants to offer its customers a “good experience” and not keep them in the apps at any price, Zuckerberg said.
In Europe, however, such statements are viewed very critically. Just a few days ago, after a report on access to child pornography content on Instagram, the EU Commission called for Meta to act quickly.
The Facebook Group’s commitment to child protection does not seem to be working, wrote EU Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton. Meta founder and boss Mark Zuckerberg now has to give answers and react immediately. Breton announced he would visit Meta’s Menlo Park headquarters on June 23 and address the issue in person. He should have Haugen’s book in his luggage.
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