Will Facebook's Whistleblower Leaks Lead to More Regulation?

According to an internal leaked study by Facebook, the company knew the negative impact Instagram has on teenagers.

Podcast on Facebook Whistleblower Leaks and Regulation. Image used for representation only. 

(Photo: Aroop Mishra/The Quint)

You may think that it’s been an unsteady week for Facebook, with all its platforms like Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram going dark for six hours on 4 October, affecting billions around the globe. But, this wasn’t the worst thing to happen to Facebook this week.

Based on a trove of over 10,000 documents provided by a whistleblower, The Wall Street Journal over the past few weeks revealed that Facebook fully understands how its products influence and harm society.

And just a day after the outage, the crisis deepened after the whistleblower, Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee, came forward and testified before the US Congress and gave lawmakers a candid view on how the company functions and its efforts to keep people hooked on the platform despite knowing its ill effects.

For example, in an internal study by Facebook, the company knew the negative impact Instagram has on teenage girls, how certain algorithms designed to make the platform a healthier place were actually having the opposite effect and the fact that Facebook senior management, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg, knew all of this.

In this episode, we will break down what exactly was revealed by the whistleblower, its impact and also answering the bigger question-whats next for Facebook? Are more stringent regulations in its future? and what would they be?

To discuss all this, for today’s episode we spoke with Apar Gupta, Executive Director of the Internet Freedom Foundation.