It's not about Teen Girls: Frances Haugen and The Cabal Against Facebook
She has a Body-Image Problem
I have never been a Facebook fan. That is proven by me never having had a personal Facebook account. I’ve been there, of course. But I limited my visits to it only advertise two short books I once self-published, when I was younger and more naïve than I am now. Since I have my reasons never to have had a personal account there, I have always been quite interested in learning what someone from the inside with lost love for Facebook would have to say that could confirm my misapprehensions about the once named “Social Network.” My ill-will toward Facebook is more than justified in my mind because I reckon, and know from direct experience, that ever since it set foot on this earth, meeting real-life people, being personable, making friends, cultivating your individuality, having meaningful conversations of the kinds that do not revolve around selfies and “likes,” and reading more than the cautions to self-promoting, narcissistic images, started to be harder to come by. But if you are a man, and since that is what I was birthed to be, Facebook and Instagram made ever harder to look at any woman of any age without feeling “pervy” or wishing you were if only not to let go to waste the flesh-flashing free shows that leaped at you from everywhere around you, and at least be able to enjoy the free goodies with a good conscience You will soon see how this wish of being a real perv goes to the heart of my take on Frances Haugen’s spiel on 60Minutes and before Congress.
That being my stance with respect to Facebook, I felt something close to self-vindication watching the self-proclaimed whistleblower tear down Mark Zuckerberg on 60Minutes, while at the same time wondering whether what she was stating as her motivations to stab her former employer on the back were genuine. That is, I was asking myself if she was really coming out knifing against him purely motivated by her concerns for the wellbeing of society, and for the poor, rundown broken nations of the world. If she was moving against Facebook on their behalf, I was with her. And yet, I was at the same time wondering whether she had a hidden agenda that to implemented required false pretenses and bravado, and a do-goody resolve. To be sure, on YouTube I played and replayed her appearance before Congress. Truth be told, initially I was pleased that, yes, the Facebook whistleblower really was what she proclaimed herself to be; but the more I watched and thought it over I came to understand that she decided to come out knifing not exactly for the reasons she was peddling out there─ which, you guessed it, it is as saying that her agenda, if not exactly hidden, its content was hiding in plain sight. How she managed that is now the one important question which I set out to answer in this longish post.
In my conclusions, the charges Frances Haugen levels against Facebook are all true, but only on the surface. Yet, once a thorough critical analysis is carried out, they all go away. Only then you get to see that the arguments she puts forward are not more than the soundbites and the gags that veil what she’s up to. And what she is really up to can be summarized in about five bullet-points. Therefore, here they are, arranged in order of their strategic priority in France Haugen’s not so-well hidden agenda:
· F.H seeks to create the political situation conditional to which Facebook could eventually agree, or otherwise find itself compelled to admit defeat and accept and even welcome to be ruled from outside.
· F.H seeks to cause Facebook to suffer a dramatic loss in market and trading value to create the adequate PR pressure that would lead the loss of reputation that would make “business like usual” unsustainable, and thus galvanize the quanta of power that could force the business organization into making itself available for inquiry, and at the very least to contemplate accepting to be transformed from the outside, by Congress, channeling the inputs from American national security organizations, in an initiative in which F.H. herself would play a leading role.
· F.H. seeks not to reform but to transform Facebook into a more effective networking platform that can better serve American international and global interests, and this means to outfit its algorithms to become a more proactive espionage and counterespionage business organization, to more effectively go after countries like China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea that directly or through proxies have a presence on Facebook, and also go after organizations, groups and right-leaning international and domestic extremist and/or terrorist groups and severally entities and individuals officially declared by the American government to be security threats.
· F.H. seeks Facebook to rewrite its algorithms so that it becomes functionally capable of assuming a “re-psychologizing” role in society. This means technologically outfitting Facebook to behave as a sort of global psychological arbiter or psychological cop that can manage, control, and dictate the reactions most “appropriate” to the messages and contents it produces and distributes. To this end, Facebook is to be forced to rework its algorithms to acquire the predictive capabilities required to ban, censor, and suppress certain words, terminology, and even whole syntactical constructions in every language in which it is globally read. In other words, Facebook is to be transformed so that it can algorithmically legislate on “free speech,” as an expedient to banning “hate speech.”
· H.F seeks to transform Facebook so that it is algorithmically capable of acquiring or adopting global nanny or parental responsibilities.
To make more explicit the analysis of the hidden agenda of the alleged “whistleblower’s,” “strategic priority” above simply indicates that success depends on how Facebook’s reaction succeeds in thwarting or unwittingly aiding F.H’s end-game, which as I said above is cloaked, that is, intentionally misrepresented as an honest preoccupation on behalf of society at large, supposedly well-meaning friendly foreign government, and in particular, tee girls, not boys─ yourself the former presumably being the most fragile, defenseless, and all-in-all weakest link of liberal democracy.
If you are asking how I know all this, I will fully disclose that I have no batch of leaked documents to base my reading of this new Facebook fracas. Instead, my sources are F.H. herself. I can hear the B.S. reverberating on the background in her pontification that Facebook, a) creates false choices— “hate speech v. free speech”; b) that Facebook “amplifies anger and divisiveness,” and, c) that Facebook “places profits above safety.” I also take hints from the questions she has been asked in both shows, the prerecorded one and the live one. Armed with a wee bee of logical inference and a fundamentally analytical understanding of what is what in our world I perform something of a close reading, searching for logical consistency in her argumentations, and then decide whether she holds water. That tells me everything there is to know about how well she knows what she’s talking about. No; I am not doubting that all she’s saying is in the batch of documents she legally stole from her former employer. But at the same I am also doubting her she stole them for noble reasons. So, let us see.
THE FALSE CHOICE: Hate Speech v Free Speech
What Frances Haugen might be up to going against Facebook is nowhere revealed with as much clarity as when she pontificates that Facebook places before us a “false choice” between “Hate speech v Free speech.” You can immediately notice the logical inconsistency of the statement, and you can infer from it that F.H. proceeds from the pedestrian misconception that free speech is what guarantees or leads to “freedom” whereas “hate speech” leads to its opposite. F.H. chooses not to see that if you can choose between one thing and another, then the choice is real, and that is more so especially if you believe that the two things you can choose from are diametrically opposed to one another, which is what she claims to be the case between “hate speech” and “free speech.” It follows that the argument that hate speech and free speech are dichotomous, is a fallacy, since there is not an inherent opposition between these two discursive categories. As a matter of logical thinking, or if you will, of Reasonability, for hate speech to be even conceived of, there must be free speech in the first place. The latter presupposes the former and the former is, in the strict sense of the expression, only one of the varying ways in which free speech expresses or materializes itself in discourse. This is not to say, as our alleged “whistleblower” might take it to mean, that free speech is the same as hate speech; what this means is that whereas the former is an absolute, the latter is a relative category of discourse and communication, in that it is a cultural construct. So being it, what today is construed as “hate speech” was not necessary the same that could have been called so yesterday; and what tomorrow might be taken to be “hate speech” might not be the same that is today called so. And the message that in the morning you received and interpreted as hateful is not necessarily how you will process it if you read it at night, and the other way around.
Also, the message you would interpret as “hateful” I in my turn might interpret as merely annoying, upsetting, or incommoding. Then again, I might have more than one reason to interpret and react to a message in this or that way, and my reasons do not need to be the same as yours─ that is, I might read a message emotionally whereas you read the same message rationally. Further, if we wanted to understand this at deeper level still, we could say that “hate speech” is “free speech” that has stopped being so. How, you ask? The relation between free speech and “hate speech” is dominated by linguistic pragmatics, a fundamental concept in the field of discourse analysis. Accordingly, if free speech reaches its limits when a call to harm is received and it is acted upon, hate speech can by the same logic be and remain free speech if no harm comes of it even though the call to harm others is received, but not acted upon. The far-reaching implication here is that unless a speech makes a call to inflict harm and does so in an explicit or unmistakable way, it remains free speech for the mere reason of just being the exercising of your freedom to freely speak. Or, if you prefer, only after the facts can it be decided as a certainty that free speech has morphed into or has given pace to hate speech.
Otherwise said: hate speech cannot be determined in advance with any degree of certitude; at most, the likelihood of a message whose content we deem disparaging, mocking, demeaning, or deprecatory can be evaluated and tagged as being this or that. But, since what is likely to be is not yet fact, unless someone arbitrarily, that is, ideologically or moralistically were to decide beforehand what will be called that, hate speech cannot be predicted, cannot be determined in advance either by direct human controls or by direct algorithmic manipulation. It is for this reason that disclaiming, warnings, and cautionary speech exists, for they operate in the “gray area” between and around free speech and what could be interpreted as being “hateful.”
Thus, if we should take her at her word, it would seem what F. H. is simply about to postulating herself as the global arbiter of free speech. For, wouldn’t deciding beforehand what would be called “hate speech” be paramount in practice to controlling or suppressing free speech itself? It would seem obvious that in the mind of the alleged Facebook’s whistleblower “hate speech” is something reducible to what liberal legalese calls “hate crime.” From her spiel in front of the cameras, it seems also obvious that she shares the same mindset with the liberal ideology that gave us this redundant terminology: every crime against a human person is ipso facto a hateful act, even if not motivated by hatred. Thus, whereas “hate speech” is not dichotomous with “free speech,” “hate speech” is not homologous with “hate crime,” even though by its legal definition the latter is necessarily present in the former. It is possible, but likely that F. H. is “powered” by this conceptual confusion, so easily to fall prey to if you are a lackey to the activist anglings of corporate mainstream media and Big Academia’s activism. She might be intentionally obfuscating.
But then, “free speech,” and everything that relates to it, is not a tech but a concept pertaining to political philosophy, where guiding should be sought by whoever wants to speak about it with propriety. Then again, conceptual propriety would not serve well to someone who is convinced Facebook could do better under her purview. Yet, we also know that making rigorous conceptual distinction is never the thing for politically correct or any other type of totalitarianism.
AMPLIFIED ANGER AND DIVISIVENESS
Now, assuming the discussion above was enough clear and it is readily understood from it that hate speech and free speech are not reciprocally excluding concepts, and that the former always presupposes the latter, then it is easy to grasp that “hate” speech is only one of the number of speeches that could be registered on social media, as they circulate in society. Therefore, there are in society as many “speeches” as they are emotions, feelings, attitudes, moral valuation systems, etc. etc. through which and as which free speech materializes as specific political value constitutive of some specific social systems. But then this suggests that from an unprejudiced, non-moralistic apprehension of the concept none of the manners in which free speech can potentially materialize has prevalence over the others─ and that is so even when there might be a preference for some and not for other of the multifarious modes in which it attains. Then, what F.H. seems to be up to is to forcing Facebook’s hand to accept at face-value what she and people of her cast of mind, ideology, or political interest prefer to be accepted as bona fides “free speech.”
From this perspective, if F.H. claims and Facebook has publicly admitted that it conducted its own internal research on how much “hate” speech it allows, promotes, or disseminates on its platform, conducting such research was a serious mistake on its part: simply put, that was unnecessary. It reflects that just like its nemesis, Facebook too does not have a philosophical, scholarly grasp on the nature of the relation between free speech and all the other types of possible speeches in public discourse. The facetious use it makes of the word “hate” in the quotation below makes this explicit.
And yet, paradoxically, it is thanks to that mistake that we can tell that F.H. has either misinterpreted, manipulated, or altogether failed to understand the findings of Facebook’s internal research on “hate” speech. For, if Facebook’s research concluded that it “may action as little a 3-5% of hate and about 6-tenths of 1% of violence and incitement despite being the best in the world at it,” then what the researchers are actually saying is that even the best in the world can have but a considerably very low influence in inducement to “anger and divisiveness.” Yet, if in F. H’s estimation those numbers still represent much too much “anger and divisiveness” then that suggests that “hate” speech does not count on or necessitate Facebook for it to prosper. But, more importantly, Facebook’s data also imply that “hate” speech is not directly connected, nor does it alone determine the “anger and divisiveness”; at the most, it is used by the pent-up anger and divisiveness in society as a trigger. And yet, as the Facebook’s data show, not an enough effective one. So, it is not as if Facebook is to be blamed whenever the Third World War breaks off.
Nonetheless, and despite F.H.’s hypocritical concerns, it is not as if she doesn’t know that “anger and divisiveness” are not always necessarily something bad. She knows that it all depends on where that happens and who is targeted by it. For instance, because Facebook is without a doubt a formidable tool to cause anger and divisions inside countries like China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and other places which the US have less than friendly relations with and actively works toward their demise, it can do and does serve American international interests. It is no doubt disingenuous on the part of someone like F. H., whom journalist sources friendly to Russia suspect of being in cahoots with American spies, to say that this network’s algorithms are the problem that must be regulated because they cause societal anger and divisions in enemy’s columns. This gives her had away. Adducing how European governments complaint that the “hate” speech that reaches their societies through Facebook forces them to introduce policies they rather would not is self-serving both on the part of those governments and on F. H.’s part. Just consider that since the end of the Second World War Europe has uninterruptedly and firmly been moving to the left and continues to move to the left even more, proving that Facebook’s algorithms have no influence on those societies. As for Ethiopia’s complaint F.H. refers to: isn’t the Ethiopian government an interested party in whatever amount of “anger and divisions” is causing the wrecking Ethiopian society from within?
Any attempt at addressing any of the points made here in a direct, clear way would inevitably reveal the hidden agenda and the hypocrisy running through F. H.’s spiel on both 60Minutes and Congress, letting us see in one stroke the self-contradictions central to her anti-Facebook project. The unfortunate fact is that anger and divisions are necessarily present in a society that, like the American, is to the brim with myriads sources from where that emanate. Opposed social classes, races, ethnic backgrounds, sexualities, political ideologies, sexual identities and preferences, religious beliefs, and regional colorings, are all permanent sources of anger and divisiveness. The more diverse these foci of conflicts are, the more “anger and divisions.” And this explains the American social reality today and even more its reality tomorrow. It follows that, instead of making Facebook into the villain that it is, but for totally different reasons, people like F.H. and the corporate media should do more to demand from governments to do what it must to stave off or eliminate the societal sources of the myriad social, racial, and sexual conflicts. For that is what turn into anger and divisiveness.
PROFITS ABOVE SAFETY
If despite everything discussed above you still give her a pass and believe F.H.’s claim that Facebook places “profits above safety,” then bear in mind that on the one hand, Facebook is not expressly in the security or safety but in the for-profit communication business. And while at it, bear also in mind that it allows the same technological capabilities to practically anybody that wants or needs to communicate their content to anybody else. These two points should suffice to give an off-hand dismissal to this charge. But if you still find it holds any water, then you might want to consider that whatever merit it may have hinges on what is meant by “safety” in the so-called whistleblower’s deployment of the word. Alas, Facebook trades no in arms or weapons, nor on forbidden or controlled substances but in words and pictures which besides are willingly made available and similarly willingly read and screened and scanned by people who also willingly post them.
Thar interacting and dealing in words and self-created images should lead to talks of “safety” is what is truly alarming for what it says about the type of society America has become. And that in turn can be read as a marking of the intellectual decline─ of the cultural and psychological decay of a society that for two or three generations have been politically indoctrinated by Big Academia and people of the same cast of minds as F. H. to place their emotions above their intelligence, and as result has by now ended up incapable of accepting or rejecting anything on Reasonability. Consequently, irrationality now prevails everywhere and in everything where Reason used to. As a demonstration ─if Facebook is not in the security or safety business; and if Facebook is not a non-for-profit operation, what sense does it make, or rather, what is the role of Reason in the accusation that it places “profits above safety”? This question means: if Facebook is neither directly nor indirectly conducive either to the loss of lives or properties, why should it be expressly responsible if teen girls become emotionally vulnerable and on this account claim to “want” to harm themselves just because they succumb to their envy for the bodily image of other teens just like them who however do not feel like harming themselves? What is the role of Reason in the demand that Facebook take over parental responsibilities, thus unburdening parents of teenage girls of theirs? That sounds like the equivalent of demanding that Facebook become something like a global Nanny or Babysitter State. Of course, these questions are rhetorical.
But what this line of questioning attempts to demonstrate is that it is as irrational to denounce Facebook for not “tweaking” its algorithms so that some teen girls do not look at pictures of other teen girls that would supposedly make them to “want” to harm themselves as much as it would be irrational not to denounce Facebook for not “tweaking” the algorithms so that teen girls cannot post pictures of themselves that potentially could induce “self-image” trauma in other teen girls. Of course, psychological awareness of what is at work in this suppression and denial of Reasonability suggests that it can only come from someone whose own body-image problem has become emotionally traumatizing to the point that the hypotheticals above can make perfect sense for them.
If taken ad hominem, as it is not intended, this remark could of course offer an insight into F.H.’s personal case. However, and be as it may, by the same token that remark also offers an insight into the state of affairs in contemporary America society. Characteristically, this is the state of affairs of a society that has by now ended up being de facto dominated by the emotionality and emotiveness of sexual and racial groups that, proceeding from socio-psychological resentment and out of not knowing it is only that─ emotionality and emotiveness─ want and seek to bring down everything build and acquired by anybody who is white and male, and what makes it worse, also heterosexual. And that only because in being that, as a group they are the biological embodiment of logical rationality, on which everything has thus far been build or attained that is lasting and productive. To leave no room for doubts: lacking self-awareness and shunning intelligent critical reasoning, emotionality and emotiveness are the driving forces that presently seek to lord it over everyone else who haven’t yet given up thinking, who have learned to keep their emotions in check, and are therefore capable of building business organizations that can even employ the Frances Haugens of the world and her ilk.
So, when placed in the larger context of the state of affairs in today’s American society, in which even the most unsuspecting institutions, some unwittingly and
some proactively have come to be dominated by notions that originate in political correctness, what the so-called whistleblower F.H. is up to reveals itself. Namely, in denouncing and backstabbing a for-profit business organization for putting profits before “safety” F. H. is attempting, among other things, to spread to the rest of society the same irrationality that calls for and has been imposing the inquisitorial emoting ringing referred to as “Trigger Warning,” that demands “Safe Space” in every American classroom and college campus through the last ten years or more. It is easy to see how in this case we are really dealing with the same emoting irrationality that is presiding over the thrashing and banning of our literary classics and the whole field of classical studies, including but not limited to Greek philosophy. That is how now, online as well as offline there are words and images that are considered “harmful” to teen girls and their older sisters. Regrettably, this forces you to think that maybe the past ages that kept women from acquiring formal education while sharing the same spaces we men were not so misguided after all, and that maybe the Taliban too know what they are trying to keep their lot from.
It is not by chance that such emoting irrationality issues forth the feminist “Gender Studies” departments everywhere, which is now vertiginously spreading to the realm of technology and hence to society at large, aided by mostly white heterosexual male politicians from the left and from the right whose petty politics prevent them seeing the whole picture and cannot fathom the depths of what is really at stake. To spell it out for them: what’s here at stake is the historic political reversal of the relation gender-power. F.H.’s betrayal of and attack on Facebook is done not really for the sake of body-image traumatic teen girls, unless she counts herself in; it is done as part of a long-term push for the feminization and effemination of American ideas, institutions, and organizations of any kinds. That is for example what we presently are seeing taking place everywhere in the American armed forces and national security agencies. Let us not be mistaken about what Frances Haugen represents and vies for. Gender-powered resentment is an evil master; it is more so given the pragmatic alliance of feminism with the whole landscape of diverse but converging identities─ racial, cultural, and sexual orientation and/or preference.
To be sure, if it were not emotive irrationality but logical rationality and reasonability from where the indictment of Facebook issues for, we would have a Frances Haugen by any other name suggesting, or whatever, demanding Mark Zuckerberg allows an algorithmic tweaking that would require teen girls to have verifiable parental consent to get an Instagram account and to visit and post on the platform. Or else, the demand would rationally and reasonably be that Facebook, or rather the government, limit the number of hours per week teen girls can be on Instagram and online generally, seeing how “fragile” they can be to pics. Of course, the second of this possible solution is already implemented in communist and autocratic China where however logical rationality imposes that the government should assume its societal responsibility, and it does. But not in liberally democratic America.
We can now ask: how much truth is there in the complaint by teen girls, weaponized by F.H. against Facebook, that visiting Instagram induced in them self-harming thoughts? To be sure, if the so-called whistleblower is being truthful here; if the data she refers to Facebook obtained through self-report, that by itself makes these data unreliable: self-porting endows the teen girls with the ambivalent privilege of being both at once the victims and the perpetrators of their claimed victimhood. As a matter of rigorous scientific methodology, whatever data get obtained through self-reporting on matters psychological or emotional must be probed into; it must be compared with data independently obtained from the empirical world of the self-reporting subjects. Otherwise, how can we reliably know in this case that we are not dealing with the typical home-grown teen drama-queen we all grew up with, which is glorified by Hollywood, sold at the box office, and periodically re-absolved into the culture and co-opted by the psyche of American teen girls, who as a result are so good at it?
Unfortunately for the so-called whistleblower, when observed in their habitat in the empirical world─ wherever they can be found in the public space (and they are thankfully found everywhere), American teen girls in overwhelming numbers do not show visible signs of body-image trauma. All to the contrary, they show themselves self-asserted in their aggressive virtual nudity. It is quite probably that never in the history of dressing, that is of fashion in the western world, have teen girls and their older sisters, and often their mothers too, shown as much willful girl-power to expose their netherworld to the sun─ to the camera, to the public at large, and to the male members of their families, as in the present time. Besides the ubiquity of twerking in later years, the empirical world of American girl-teen-hood has been noticeable for the unbiquitousness of the see-through, the nudie-jeans, the crotch-cut-up-shorts, the
camel-toed yoga pants, and the ever receding and creeping short skirts. As any honest citizen would know, the American High School ground, the college campus, the classroom, and the library have been seeing more than their fair share of the pornographic infantilization, or vise-versa, of the semi-infantilization of the pornographic image stapled on the bodies of teen girls, their older sisters, and whenever they allow it themselves, of their mothers too. It might not be for nothing if this phenomenon would be found to historically coincide with the landing of Facebook and Instagram on this earth. Personally, I look and look and keep looking wherever I go but see no trauma even near wherever teen girls and their older sisters are. So, I really do not know what F.H is talking about here.
In conclusion, if instead of solving its PR problems through implementing any of the two suggestions above Facebook decides to cow and cave in to Congress and F.H., good luck to it. It can also try rebranding itself, but the task is unsurmountable. It would on the one hand embark itself in a global “re-psychologizing” project to fix whatever the emotional defects are that leave some teen girls so traumatically envious to “want” to harm themselves. The only silver line here is that as Mike Solana notes, those are relatively speaking never too many. On the other hand, that would also demand at the same time undertaking a de-psychologizing project to rewire Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp users to not overreact and to become less prone to let the anger and divisiveness pent up within themselves to give pace to hurting and harmful actions even as they exercise their right to free speech. Good luck with that, too.
As far easier task would be for the American public and Mark Zuckerberg to ask Frances Haugen this one question: how come she does not or claim she does not want to bring about a Facebook getting broken up by the government? That could be the most important question she could asked, but which neither 60Minutes nor anybody from Congress did, while she of her own sneakily provided a subterfuge of an “answer.” I hope only very few are swallowing the BS explanation she’s put forward (that breaking Facebook up would only make things worse because, (as she said, paraphrasing President Biden’s statements earlier this year), “most of the dollars would go to Instagram” and nothing would then change, leaving Facebook in position to continue “endangering lives around the world.” Put two and two together, and the result would be the final revelation of what the fake whistleblower is up to.
But first, ask back to her: how does she so a priori know that that would be the sure outcome of breaking up Facebook? How is she so sure Zuckerberg’s dollars will go to Instagram and not elsewhere? Does her worry mean she cares less about free speech and less about the elimination of “hate speech,” but more about putting “profits above safety”? Is she saying she cares more about the drama of American teen girls who threaten to “harm” themselves but statistically and factually do not, than about all the lives she claims Facebook is endangering around the world? Learn to know a fake when you see one. To be sure, the true reason Frances Haugen concentrates on diverting the public attention toward Facebook’s algorithms and opposes breaking it up, which would most likely solve her problem, is that a broken-up Facebook would be less effective as a handy tool for American global espionage and counterespionage. By denouncing it, vilifying it, and discrediting it, she is seeking to shame and humiliate Facebook into willingly, but under threat, to agree to play the role that some sources have always claimed Facebook was created for. And that is why the whistle is blowing.