Frances Haugen, a former data scientist for Facebook, testified to Congress on Oct. 5 about the tech giant’s negligence of acknowledging its societal harms, particularly to children.
Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-TN, questioned Haugen about 600,000 Instagram accounts that were found to be of those under age 13 in the last three months, according to parent company Facebook. Haugen commented there are “probably more.”
Haugen pointed to issues with understaffed teams at Facebook that prevent the company from tackling as many issues as they know about on the platform. On the counter-espionage team she worked on, for example, she said it could only handle a third of known cases.
“Often problems were so understaffed that there was kind of an implicit discouragement from having better detection systems,” Haugen said.
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