The Social Reckoning hits cinemas this Friday, but the real world has already been working on a sequel – or rather, a threequel. Directed by Aaron Sorkin, the movie is a follow-up to The Social Network, detailing the further misadventures of Mark Zuckerberg and his social media empire, and in particular Frances Haugen, the employee who in 2021 leaked internal documents that appeared to show Facebook was aware of the harms its products had inflicted. It’s no spoiler to reveal the film climaxes with Haugen’s testimony to the US Senate, on 5 October 2021.
That very same day, Arturo Béjar, a consultant on the wellbeing team of Instagram (which is also owned by Facebook), hit send on a long-gestating email to Zuckerberg and other senior Facebook executives on a similar theme. For example: 24.4% of 13-15-year-olds on Instagram said they had received unwanted advances, and 21.8% said they had been the target of bullying on the platform in the past seven days. Furthermore, 51% of Instagram users said they had had a bad or harmful experience in the past seven days.
Only 1% of them reported it, and of those, 2% had the content taken down – so just 0.02%. This was a far greater degree of harm than the company’s existing measurements suggested. Zuckerberg never replied.
By that time, Béjar had worked at Facebook (which rebranded as Meta later that month) for a total of eight years. He had learned how to communicate with Zuckerberg. That’s how he related to things, which is also what’s behind all the grief in the world right now.” Béjar has seen The Social Reckoning, and he recognises Jeremy Strong’s portrayal of Zuckerberg as a detached, awkward, humourless control freak all too well.
He’s one of the most fiercely competitive people I know.” One time, Béjar recalls, he and Zuckerberg were walking together after a fraught meeting. He was still hoping Zuckerberg would respond to his appeal to engineer a “culture shift” in the way Instagram dealt with protecting its young users. The next day, however, Zuckerberg issued a statement to Facebook employees about Haugen’s testimony and the leaked “Facebook Files” that were being reported by the Wall Street Journal and others.
That’s just not true,” Zuckerberg wrote. But by then Béjar knew it was true. By 2023, Béjar was following in Haugen’s footsteps and testifying to the US senate himself.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
