Okay, folks, here is a summary of part. One of the testimony of francis hogan 37 years old product manager, former product manager at facebook, she's got a degree from harvard, and this is a summary of what she mentioned to the senate uh today or the senate. Hearing committee, so francis hogan mentions that a facebook repeatedly misled the public about what its own research reveals about the safety of children and the efficacy of its artificial intelligence systems. As a role in spreading divisive and extreme messages, she says that facebook has the potential to bring out the worst of us, but could also bring out the best of us if we had proper controls for facebook.

She believes that facebook harms children, stokes division and harms democracy. She says that facebook puts profit before people and that they will not solve the problems they have without the help or compelling of congress. She says that facebook resolves conflicts within the company in favor of its own profits, rather than uh what is best for society later she mentions that facebook pays for their profit with our safety. She says the results are more profit for facebook, but more lies and more combativeness in our society, and sometimes sometimes this actually leads to violence.

She mentions that the company intentionally hides vital information that could potentially lead regulators to pay attention to facebook more. She says that facebook purposefully hides behind walls that keep researchers out. This is different from what google does, for example, where researchers can access data and do more research comparison. She made these uh problems, she says, are very solvable and she gives some suggestions for how to solve these issues, which we'll talk about in just a moment.

She also mentions that children most children who use facebook, probably don't have the self-awareness to recognize the true issues of what facebook is actually doing to them and how facebook is actually hurting them. She mentions that facebook uh likely she mentions that facebook says that children lie about their age, but the reality is. Statistics within facebook show that most children tell the truth and you can figure out most children's actual ages by doing some backward analysis, and she mentions that the real problems that facebook beyond people potentially lying about their age, because this was a question that came up - were Really, a staffing related that there aren't enough humans involved in decision making or problem solving at facebook. And so ultimately, when there is understaffing, groups within facebook are discouraged from actually trying to solve the issues, because that could potentially lead to more work when they're already overwhelmed.

So, for example, francis mentioned that she was on a counter espionage, uh group or cell or whatever and uh at any. Given time she said, they could only deal with one third of the caseload they had. If they would work on building a better detector to find more problems, then they would just be even more overwhelmed and even more behind, and so she cites a lack of humans and a lack of staff as some of the problems of the issues that we have At facebook she says that her goal is to fix facebook. However, facebook should declare moral bankruptcy.

She mentions that some things that could help are things like the kids act. The kids act by the way are things or is an act that would limit things like autoplay push alerts and like buttons or even follower accounts for children. There was a mention that facebook's q2 revenue per user is 35 and 58 cents annualized. That would be over uh 135 dollars, which is pretty incredible, actually, probably over 140 dollars.

Senator klobuchar says that uh algorithms are likely to promote uh outrageous content to which base or to which uh francis says absolutely. Facebook uses engagement based content, algorithms that basically amplify extremes and in reverse engineering facebook found that it could actually lead people in studies to to do or act a certain way. So, for example, when the question was asked, can facebook's algorithm lead people to anorexia. She said the answer was yes, that research had shown that facebook has that power, which is kind of incredible to think about that facebook could essentially manipulate you by catering certain messages to you.

Facebook invests more in its users that make them more money. She says uh specifically in the english language. She talked a little bit more about the algorithm. The engagement based, ranking algorithm.

She counters what facebook might say. She believes that facebook would say that facebook uh says you won't like facebook as much. If we didn't cater content for you, she has more of a preference saying that hey maybe we don't need algorithms to cater content for us. Maybe maybe we could go time based uh on on the way we view content in a feed, but we've also seen that by the way, like youtube, remember back in the day and i'm making this reference here back in the day, youtube was very subscription-based.

If you subscribe to a channel, you would see a list of all the videos from your subscriptions, but youtube found that that didn't actually increase viewership instead, providing you content that wasn't necessarily from your subscriptions list. But what was most deemed to get the most view. Time from you ended up growing the platform substantially more, and so that's why they switched to that sort of platform. I imagine facebook has found very much the same thing to be true, that catered content increases engagement and that's why they use that.

The problem is the content that facebook is likely to promote is content. That's likely to quote elicit an extreme reaction from the user, because in that case, it's more likely to generate likes and shares leading other people not only to view and consume that content and then potentially share that content, but also promoting other people to create content. And so on, youtube, it's worth noting that when youtube suggests a video to you it's because each video has a predetermined or pre-estimated watch time per impression, and so every time they show you a thumbnail. They assume that on average you're going to spend five minutes here or 10 minutes here eight minutes here, but that watch time per impression is really important because it also calculates how likely you are to share that video because see if you watch a video for eight Minutes and don't share it.

That's eight minutes if you watch a video and share it with a person who then shares it to another person who shares it to another person that could be 24 or 32 minutes of watch time per that one impression they gave you right so they're. Looking for that sort of outrageous or extreme content, youtube does pretty much the same thing. Facebook says it's uh artificial intelligence can find bad content uh francis says, but she argues that you can't rely on artificial intelligence to solve these issues or or to find bad content, because in her research they found uh and and on sort of groups that she's worked On they found that ai was only about 10 to 15 percent, effective at actually finding content that violated uh the terms of services or was bad content on facebook. And so she believes that's very important for not only research to be shared with congress, but congress to provide oversight to congress.

Maybe even facebook and cr create suggestions for how that oversight should look. Uh and congress can collaborate on that sense. She was also a big fan of what twitter is doing, with link sharing when twitter, when somebody posts a link, and somebody wants to retweet that twitter has a little notification that pops up and says you haven't read this aren't. Do you want to read this article before you re-share it facebook she says, doesn't do this because that would reduce shares and facebook likes shares, so they don't want to stand in the way of of of um people sharing content.

She doesn't believe that you having to click on the article before sharing it, is actually a form of censorship. Instead, she says: hey like this is a good way to help prevent miss or disinformation. Now uh, let's see here, she also mentions - and i thought this was very interesting - uh another senator came up and brought up some examples of how facebook's ad review had failed a few times. I actually have that up right here and here's an example.

So this is by the techtransparencyproject.org, the ttp referenced by a senator during the hearing, and they submitted this ad targeted to 13 to 17 year olds. They never ran these ads. They just wanted to see if these ads would get approved, and so here's one it says it's time for some skittles are you in and it's a picture of a bunch of drugs, throw a skittles party like no other, and that was approved. Here's one that shows a picture of a skinny girl and says when you're craving a snack visit pro anorexia sites to feed your motivation and reach your goal, except they shorten anorexia and just call it ana.

And then they call it an antitip and how this got approved, or here's some other dating or gambling or alcohol or smoking ads that got promoted to 13 to 17 year olds and they show how quickly these were approved. A potential reach of 9.1 million 13 to 17 year olds and they submitted these ads and got basically approval within uh at exactly the same time within about an hour without within an hour and one minute. All of these ads were approved and look at that. All of the ads were approved at exactly the same time.

See that here this 41 pm approve, approve, approve approval, proof all of them at exactly the same time. Now, francis, it doesn't work on these particular ad teams, but she believes that it's likely that algorithms are approving these and that it's very unlikely that humans are looking at at all of these ads. And if facebook is relying on algorithms to review ads, then it's likely that only 10 to 15 of bad ads are actually caught, which is a problem and especially when she believes that facebook creates mental health issues for not just women, but also children in general, which We've seen through the wall street journal expose where there's ample evidence of mental health deterioration in individuals who are children, especially girls, but also boys, and one of the issues that she cites is suggesting that parents don't really know how to help their children, because they didn't Really grow up with social media, they might say something like hey just stop using facebook, but that would be bad advice because people have a temptation to continue to resort to social media because of the way our brains are wired, the dopamine release of every time. We check our phone and so she says this is an issue, because when you wake up in the morning, you see people who are cruel to you.

When you go to sleep at night, you see people who are cruel to you through facebook, and this is very different from how bullying, for example, used to work bullying in schools didn't used to follow you home. Now it follows you home wherever you are and you don't get a break from that sort of bullying and and that continues to, unfortunately perpetuate negative mental health for for children. She uh she's a big fan of promoting oversight and regulation to section 230. The communication decency act she mentions that platforms like facebook have 100 control over their algorithms and algorithms should not prioritize growth at the sake of or at the expense of public safety uh.

She also mentions that 80 to 90 of sensitive content in terms of swear words. Somehow still makes it through facebook, algorithms and facebook. Algorithms are especially bad at identifying inappropriate content in other languages, but they're also very bad. At identifying inappropriate content in english.

Then we have uh. Let's see we talked about the ads already, and she mentions that facebook has a focus on scale. How can we do things cheaply and fast, it's very possible that a lot of content on facebook is never reviewed by uh. That submitted like for ads for in this case was for ads.

She believes it's very likely and very possible that most ads are not reviewed by humans. We touched on that already. She believes we need to quote human scale: social media, not computer, scale, social media. This kind of goes back to not having enough staff, and i you know my sort of takeaway was really that, in her opinion, artificial intelligence sucks at preventing the negative from exploding on facebook, that algorithms have too much biases or have too many biases, and that left Unchecked, you end up with, like she mentioned in her opening remarks, more divisiveness, more potential, violence, more bullying, more mental health problems, and so this gives you a summary of the first and longest part of the senate.

Testimony from francis hogan. I expect the second part to be relatively similar, but uh. This gives you part one. So thank you so much for watching.

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