While Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen is making the rounds testifying in front of Congress, the House Jan. 6 Select Committee also wants to hear her testimony.
“According to this Facebook whistleblower, shutting down the civic integrity team and turning off election misinformation tools contributed to the Jan. 6 insurrection,” Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., wrote in a post on Twitter this week. “The select committee will need to hear from her and get internal info from Facebook to flesh out their role.”
Three sources told CNN on Wednesday that Haugen could appear before the committee as early as Thursday.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., created the partisan committee earlier this year to investigate the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol where former President Donald Trump supporters protested certification of the 2020 presidential election Electoral College votes.
Ashli Babbitt was shot to death by Capitol security officer Lt. Michael Byrd, while Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick died from a pair two strokes after Jan. 6.
Three others died of natural causes, according to the Washington, D.C., medical examiner.
Haugen has been making the rounds in the last week since sitting for an interview Sunday night on the CBS News show “60 Minutes,” where she outlined how she saw the social media giant putting profits over its users, hurting many younger users, especially on its Instagram platform.
“The reality is that we’ve seen from repeated documents within my disclosures, is that Facebook’s AI systems only catch a very tiny minority of offending content,” the former Facebook product manager said during one of the Congressional hearings this week.
She was also critical of how the company did not do enough to stop disinformation regarding COVID-19 and combating human and drug trafficking through the platform.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said following her testimony, the “coverage” did not accurately represent the company.
“We care deeply about issues like safety, well-being and mental health,” he said in a statement. “It’s difficult to see coverage that misrepresents our work and our motives. At the most basic level, I think most of us just don’t recognize the false picture of the company that is being painted.”
A senior Facebook executive, Nick Clegg, told CNN on Sunday the idea the platform had anything to do with Jan. 6 was “ludicrous.”
“If the assertion is that Jan. 6 can be explained because of social media, I just think that’s ludicrous,” he told CNN’s “Reliable Sources.” “The responsibility of the violence on Jan. 6, and the insurrection on that day, lies squarely with the people who inflicted the violence, and those who encouraged them, including then-President Trump and, candidly, many other people elsewhere in the media who were encouraging the assertion that the election was stolen.”
