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New story in Technology from Time: Inside the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of Tomorrow’s Business Leaders

Tima Bansal begins every new course with a cautionary statistic for her business school students. A 2008 study found that MBA candidates enter business school with more community-oriented values, but graduate with more selfish ones. “They come in caring about the world, and they leave caring more about themselves. Why?” she says.

Bansal, a professor at Ivey Business School in London, Ontario, thinks she knows the answer. “At the heart of every single course that we teach is this orientation toward profit or leadership or themselves,” says Bansal, one of a growing number of academics who want to change that. MBA programs, they say, can no longer justify teaching future business leaders to maximize profits at the expense of the planet. The way Bansal and others see it, the world would be a better place if more businesses played an active role in tackling social and environmental challenges, from climate change to global poverty. And if the leadership ranks of major companies don’t adjust the way they do business, they warn, their fixation on making money and rewarding shareholders will exacerbate inequality and climate disasters.
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“We have a crisis on our hands, and business schools need to act,” Bansal says.

<strong>“We have a crisis on our hands, and business schools need to act.”</strong>The world’s major corporations stand at a crossroads. Many Boomer and Generation X executives have grudgingly come to the realization in recent years that they can no longer straddle the fence or remain silent on thorny social and political issues. To attract and retain the best and brightest Millennial and Gen Z employees, companies are facing pressure to express their opinions and take action on critical matters, including racial injustice, climate change and income inequality. A majority of college students (68%) say companies should take public stances on social issues. Another 16% said they wouldn’t work for a company that did not, according to a recent Axios/Generation Lab poll. Another survey, by Washington State University’s Carson College of Business, found that 70% of Gen Z employees want to work for a company whose values align with their own, and 83% want to work for a company that has a positive impact on the world.

Courtesy Tima BansalTima Bansal, a professor at the Ivey Business School in London, Ontario.

That demand is reflected in the young people seeking business graduate degrees. At Boston University’s Questrom School of Business, the number of students in the Social Impact MBA program has nearly doubled in the last decade, growing from 79 in 2011 to 155 in 2021. Since leaders at the University of Vermont ripped up the 1970s-era MBA format and redesigned it around sustainability—the term used to describe businesses that are environmentally and socially conscious—the program has grown from 20 students in 2014 to 47 in 2021. They’re considering expanding the program to 70 or 80 students after receiving a record number of applications last year.

Companies are also facing pressure from consumers who increasingly want to buy eco-friendly, ethical products from businesses that share their values. Nearly 80% of consumers say it’s important that brands are sustainable and environmentally responsible, according to a 2020 study by IBM and the National Retail Federation, which polled consumers in 28 countries. A majority (57%) of those consumers say they’re willing to change their shopping habits in order to reduce the negative impact on the environment.

For the first time this semester, Presidio Graduate School in San Francisco offered MBA students an eight-week elective course on promoting anti-racism in the workforce, adding to courses on leading inclusive organizations, prioritizing social justice in supply chains and exploring renewable energy systems. Liz Leiba—an adjunct professor teaching the course, which covers the advantages and challenges of building a diverse workplace and how to identify discrimination and bias—thinks it should be required for all students. “Diversity sometimes has been an afterthought,” she says. “Marketing is not an afterthought. Sales is not an afterthought.”

Read more: What Happened When Facebook Shut Down the Team That Put People Ahead of Profits

The movement amounts to a fight for the hearts and minds of tomorrow’s business leaders by changing how MBA students are educated. “Can we possibly justify teaching students to go out and profit their investors by depleting society and the rest of the planet?’ It’s just not a viable ethical position,” says Tom Lyon, faculty director of the Erb Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business.

But change has been slow. Universities are large, traditional institutions that tend to stick with what they know, and many major business schools have not overhauled tried-and-true programs, instead offering one-off courses on sustainability or ethics.

<strong>“We can’t do business as usual. We have to do new business.”</strong>Maggie Winslow, the academic dean at Presidio, which aims to include sustainability and social justice in every business course, says when she offered to help the dean of another business school start a sustainability curriculum, she was told “that’s just a fad.”

Lyon has struggled to get concepts such as sustainability and corporate political responsibility fully integrated into the core curriculum and notes that there hasn’t been a critical mass of students or donors demanding that change. “It’s like the MBA core is the inner sanctum of the religion of business schools. And every area feels like, ‘I have my sacred concepts I must teach, and I cannot make room for these sort of nice, but superfluous ideas,’” Lyon says.

And many of the business schools that have been leading the charge on this front are not among the country’s top-ranked MBA programs, suggesting that the most competitive business schools are hesitant to disrupt a time-tested curriculum.

But as the world experiences the devastating effects of climate change and the country confronts centuries of racial injustice, many professors argue that change has never been more urgent. “It’s an all-hands-on-deck kind of moment,” Lyon says. “We’re close to a point of turning the planet into a place that is much less inhabitable than it’s been for the last millennium.”

‘A 50-year-old paradigm’

Dartmouth founded the first graduate school of management in 1900 with the Tuck School of Business, and Harvard launched the world’s first MBA program in 1908. The MBA has since grown to be the most popular postgraduate degree in the country, making up 24% of all master’s degrees earned in the 2018-19 school year, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

But the world has changed dramatically since the MBA first became a rite of passage for business leaders, raising questions about whether courses in marketing, microeconomics and finance are a sufficient foundation for business leadership. MBA applications surged as the pandemic caused economic challenges and mass unemployment, but business schools had been contending with several years of declining applications before that.

“Business schools are still operating out of a 50-year-old paradigm. And I think that’s the fundamental problem,” Lyon says. “All the businessman had to do was just maximize profits, play within the rules, and everything was fine. And the problem is, our rules need to be changed. The system isn’t really working anymore.”

Climate change is expected to cost the global economy as much as $23 trillion by 2050, according to a 2021 report by the insurance company Swiss Re. And a reckoning over racial injustice has intensified calls for corporations to do more to promote equity and and diversity.

Courtesy Alyssa Gutner-DavisAlyssa Gutner-Davis, a student at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business.

</span><strong style="font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'Segoe UI', Roboto, Oxygen-Sans, Ubuntu, Cantarell, 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif; font-size: 16px;">“My impression was if you go to business school, you’re only focused on the economics.”</strong><span style="font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'Segoe UI', Roboto, Oxygen-Sans, Ubuntu, Cantarell, 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif; font-size: 16px;">Alyssa Gutner-Davis, a second-year student at Questrom, says if you had told her in college that she’d one day go to business school, she would have laughed. “My impression was if you go to business school, you’re only focused on the economics and do the economics pencil out, and there’s no room for thinking through any other considerations,” says Gutner-Davis, 31. But she enrolled in Questrom’s Social Impact MBA program—which includes courses on impact investing, discrimination in the workplace and environmentally sustainable supply chains— because she wanted to understand business basics in order to pursue her interests in environmental justice and clean energy.

The demand is coming from corporations too. In June, the accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers announced it would invest $12 billion over five years to create 100,000 new jobs, many with an environmental, social, and governance (ESG) focus.

Read more: Wildfires Are Getting Worse, So Why Is the U.S. Still Using Wood to Build Homes?

“Student demand is increasing. You can see employers are seeking graduates with these skills and knowledge. There’s demand from society for business schools to positively contribute to tackling some of these grand societal challenges,” says Caroline Flammer, co-faculty director of Questrom’s social impact program. She teaches a course called Social Impact: Business, Society, and the Natural Environment, which she thinks should be required for any MBA student. “In my view, the Social Impact MBA program should be the MBA program.”

<strong>“Student demand is increasing. You can see employers are seeking graduates with these skills and knowledge.”</strong> At Michigan, Lyon teaches a course on the economics of sustainability to undergraduates and a course on energy markets and energy politics to graduate students. He’s working on building a task force on corporate political responsibility, aiming to confront the way companies too often “focus on their own short term profits at the expense of the larger society.” He would like to see the concepts of ethics, sustainability and political responsibility fully integrated throughout all MBA courses, not just tacked on as a single course.

Dan WatkinsCaroline Flammer of Boston University’s Questrom School of Business.

That’s how Sanjay Sharma, dean of the University of Vermont’s Grossman School of Business, redesigned the school’s MBA program, with sustainability embedded in every subject. Students learn about impact investing, carbon pricing and analyzing social and environmental risks. They explore all case studies through a lens of environmental and social justice impacts.

Sustainability has been part of the core curriculum at Ivey, in Ontario, since 2003. When Bansal first began integrating business sustainability into strategy, finance and marketing courses—teaching students to take a long-term view and to consider social and environmental impacts in business decisions—she confronted the perception that environmental issues didn’t belong in business education. Now, she hears from students who say they “desperately need more” of these classes.

She thinks MBA programs need to do a better job of preparing students to solve today’s global challenges. “You have to have corporations that build products that solve not just their own profits, but products that actually make the world better,” she says. “That requires a different type of thinking.”

‘Business moves faster than academia’

Sharma knows that MBA programs like his, built entirely around sustainability, are still niche. Top-ranked business schools with powerful brands don’t seem eager to upend successful programs that are still attracting thousands of applicants willing to spend as much as $200,000 for their degrees and producing highly employable graduates.

“Business moves faster than academia,” Sharma says. but he thinks all business schools will be forced to adapt eventually. “If organizations demand it and if society demands it, then it’ll start happening faster.”

He and his peers are confronting a lingering stigma that courses on sustainability or social justice are nice, but not essential. “I wish I could say the vast majority of Ross students were beating down the doors for ethics and sustainability. And, you know, they’re not,” Lyon says. “The real drivers are student demand and donors. So if students start saying, ‘We have to have this material,’ schools will change.”

For university leaders, there’s nothing simple about revamping decades-old curricula or persuading tenured faculty to change their courses. But the global realities of climate instability and resource shortages could force their hand.

“If you only plan to be in business for five years, maybe you don’t want to think about it. But if you want to be in business for 50 years, then we all have to think about this,” says Winslow, the Presidio dean. “We can’t do business as usual. We have to do new business.”

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New story in Technology from Time: How Facebook Forced a Reckoning by Shutting Down the Team That Put People Ahead of Profits

Facebook’s civic-integrity team was always different from all the other teams that the social media company employed to combat misinformation and hate speech. For starters, every team member subscribed to an informal oath, vowing to “serve the people’s interest first, not Facebook’s.”

The “civic oath,” according to five former employees, charged team members to understand Facebook’s impact on the world, keep people safe and defuse angry polarization. Samidh Chakrabarti, the team’s leader, regularly referred to this oath—which has not been previously reported—as a set of guiding principles behind the team’s work, according to the sources.
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Chakrabarti’s team was effective in fixing some of the problems endemic to the platform, former employees and Facebook itself have said.

But, just a month after the 2020 U.S. election, Facebook dissolved the civic-integrity team, and Chakrabarti took a leave of absence. Facebook said employees were assigned to other teams to help share the group’s experience across the company. But for many of the Facebook employees who had worked on the team, including a veteran product manager from Iowa named Frances Haugen, the message was clear: Facebook no longer wanted to concentrate power in a team whose priority was to put people ahead of profits.

Five weeks later, supporters of Donald Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol—after some of them organized on Facebook and used the platform to spread the lie that the election had been stolen. The civic-integrity team’s dissolution made it harder for the platform to respond effectively to Jan. 6, one former team member, who left Facebook this year, told TIME. “A lot of people left the company. The teams that did remain had significantly less power to implement change, and that loss of focus was a pretty big deal,” said the person. “Facebook did take its eye off the ball in dissolving the team, in terms of being able to actually respond to what happened on Jan. 6.” The former employee, along with several others TIME interviewed, spoke on the condition of anonymity, for fear that being named would ruin their career.

Paul Morris—Bloomberg/Getty ImagesSamidh Chakrabarti, head of civic engagement for Facebook Inc., from left, Katie Harbath, head of global politics for Facebook Inc., Nathaniel Bleacher, head of cyber security policy for Facebook Inc., and Tom Reynolds, a member of the civic and community standards team at Facebook Inc., work inside the “War Room” ahead of Brazil’s runoff elction at Facebook Inc. headquarters in Menlo Park, California, Oct. 17, 2018.

 

Enter Frances Haugen

Haugen revealed her identity on Oct. 3 as the whistle-blower behind the most significant leak of internal research in the company’s 17-year history. In a bombshell testimony to the Senate Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety, and Data Security two days later, Haugen said the civic-integrity team’s dissolution was the final event in a long series that convinced her of the need to blow the whistle. “I think the moment which I realized we needed to get help from the outside—that the only way these problems would be solved is by solving them together, not solving them alone—was when civic-integrity was dissolved following the 2020 election,” she said. “It really felt like a betrayal of the promises Facebook had made to people who had sacrificed a great deal to keep the election safe, by basically dissolving our community.”

Read more: The Facebook Whistleblower Revealed Herself on 60 Minutes. Here’s What You Need to Know

In a statement provided to TIME, Facebook’s vice president for integrity Guy Rosen denied the civic-integrity team had been disbanded. “We did not disband Civic Integrity,” Rosen said. “We integrated it into a larger Central Integrity team so that the incredible work pioneered for elections could be applied even further, for example, across health-related issues. Their work continues to this day.” (Facebook did not make Rosen available for an interview for this story.)

Impacts of Civic Technology Conference 2016The defining values of the civic-integrity team, as described in a 2016 presentation given by Samidh Chakrabarti and Winter Mason. Civic-integrity team members were expected to adhere to this list of values, which was referred to internally as the “civic oath”.

Haugen left the company in May. Before she departed, she trawled Facebook’s internal employee forum for documents posted by integrity researchers about their work. Much of the research was not related to her job, but was accessible to all Facebook employees. What she found surprised her.

Some of the documents detailed an internal study that found that Instagram, its photo-sharing app, made 32% of teen girls feel worse about their bodies. Others showed how a change to Facebook’s algorithm in 2018, touted as a way to increase “meaningful social interactions” on the platform, actually incentivized divisive posts and misinformation. They also revealed that Facebook spends almost all of its budget for keeping the platform safe only on English-language content. In September, the Wall Street Journal published a damning series of articles based on some of the documents that Haugen had leaked to the paper. Haugen also gave copies of the documents to Congress and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

The documents, Haugen testified Oct. 5, “prove that Facebook has repeatedly misled the public about what its own research reveals about the safety of children, the efficacy of its artificial intelligence systems, and its role in spreading divisive and extreme messages.” She told Senators that the failings revealed by the documents were all linked by one deep, underlying truth about how the company operates. “This is not simply a matter of certain social media users being angry or unstable, or about one side being radicalized against the other; it is about Facebook choosing to grow at all costs, becoming an almost trillion-dollar company by buying its profits with our safety,” she said.

Facebook’s focus on increasing user engagement, which ultimately drives ad revenue and staves off competition, she argued, may keep users coming back to the site day after day—but also systematically boosts content that is polarizing, misinformative and angry, and which can send users down dark rabbit holes of political extremism or, in the case of teen girls, body dysmorphia and eating disorders. “The company’s leadership knows how to make Facebook and Instagram safer, but won’t make the necessary changes because they have put their astronomical profits before people,” Haugen said. (In 2020, the company reported $29 billion in net income—up 58% from a year earlier. This year, it briefly surpassed $1 trillion in total market value, though Haugen’s leaks have since knocked the company down to around $940 billion.)

Asked if executives adhered to the same set of values as the civic-integrity team, including putting the public’s interests before Facebook’s, a company spokesperson told TIME it was “safe to say everyone at Facebook is committed to understanding our impact, keeping people safe and reducing polarization.”

In the same week that an unrelated systems outage took Facebook’s services offline for hours and revealed just how much the world relies on the company’s suite of products—including WhatsApp and Instagram—the revelations sparked a new round of national soul-searching. It led some to question how one company can have such a profound impact on both democracy and the mental health of hundreds of millions of people. Haugen’s documents are the basis for at least eight new SEC investigations into the company for potentially misleading its investors. And they have prompted senior lawmakers from both parties to call for stringent new regulations.

Read more: Here’s How to Fix Facebook, According to Former Employees and Leading Critics

Haugen urged Congress to pass laws that would make Facebook and other social media platforms legally liable for decisions about how they choose to rank content in users’ feeds, and force companies to make their internal data available to independent researchers. She also urged lawmakers to find ways to loosen CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s iron grip on Facebook; he controls more than half of voting shares on its board, meaning he can veto any proposals for change from within. “I came forward at great personal risk because I believe we still have time to act,” Haugen told lawmakers. “But we must act now.”

Potentially even more worryingly for Facebook, other experts it hired to keep the platform safe, now alienated by the company’s actions, are growing increasingly critical of their former employer. They experienced first hand Facebook’s unwillingness to change, and they know where the bodies are buried. Now, on the outside, some of them are still honoring their pledge to put the public’s interests ahead of Facebook’s.

Inside Facebook’s civic-integrity team

Chakrabarti, the head of the civic-integrity team, was hired by Facebook in 2015 from Google, where he had worked on improving how the search engine communicated information about lawmakers and elections to its users. A polymath described by one person who worked under him as a “Renaissance man,” Chakrabarti holds master’s degrees from MIT, Oxford and Cambridge, in artificial intelligence engineering, modern history and public policy, respectively, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Although he was not in charge of Facebook’s company-wide “integrity” efforts (led by Rosen), Chakrabarti, who did not respond to requests to comment for this article, was widely seen by employees as the spiritual leader of the push to make sure the platform had a positive influence on democracy and user safety, according to multiple former employees. “He was a very inspirational figure to us, and he really embodied those values [enshrined in the civic oath] and took them quite seriously,” a former member of the team told TIME. “The team prioritized societal good over Facebook good. It was a team that really cared about the ways to address societal problems first and foremost. It was not a team that was dedicated to contributing to Facebook’s bottom line.”

Chakrabarti began work on the team by questioning how Facebook could encourage people to be more engaged with their elected representatives on the platform, several of his former team members said. An early move was to suggest tweaks to Facebook’s “more pages you may like” feature that the team hoped might make users feel more like they could have an impact on politics.

After the chaos of the 2016 election, which prompted Zuckerberg himself to admit that Facebook didn’t do enough to stop misinformation, the team evolved. It moved into Facebook’s wider “integrity” product group, which employs thousands of researchers and engineers to focus on fixing Facebook’s problems of misinformation, hate speech, foreign interference and harassment. It changed its name from “civic engagement” to “civic integrity,” and began tackling the platform’s most difficult problems head-on.

Shortly before the midterm elections in 2018, Chakrabarti gave a talk at a conference in which he said he had “never been told to sacrifice people’s safety in order to chase a profit.” His team was hard at work making sure the midterm elections did not suffer the same failures as in 2016, in an effort that was generally seen as a success, both inside the company and externally. “To see the way that the company has mobilized to make this happen has made me feel very good about what we’re doing here,” Chakrabarti told reporters at the time. But behind closed doors, integrity employees on Chakrabarti’s team and others were increasingly getting into disagreements with Facebook leadership, former employees said. It was the beginning of the process that would eventually motivate Haugen to blow the whistle.

Drew Angerer—Getty ImagesFormer Facebook employee Frances Haugen testifies during a Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation hearing entitled ‘Protecting Kids Online: Testimony from a Facebook Whistleblower’ in Washington, D.C., Oct. 5, 2021.

In 2019, the year Haugen joined the company, researchers on the civic-integrity team proposed ending the use of an approved list of thousands of political accounts that were exempt from Facebook’s fact-checking program, according to tech news site The Information. Their research had found that the exemptions worsened the site’s misinformation problem because users were more likely to believe false information if it were shared by a politician. But Facebook executives rejected the proposal.

The pattern repeated time and time again, as proposals to tweak the platform to down-rank misinformation or abuse were rejected or watered down by executives concerned with engagement or worried that changes might disproportionately impact one political party more than another, according to multiple reports in the press and several former employees. One cynical joke among members of the civic-integrity team was that they spent 10% of their time coding and the other 90% arguing that the code they wrote should be allowed to run, one former employee told TIME. “You write code that does exactly what it’s supposed to do, and then you had to argue with execs who didn’t want to think about integrity, had no training in it and were mad that you were hurting their product, so they shut you down,” the person said.

Sometimes the civic-integrity team would also come into conflict with Facebook’s policy teams, which share the dual role of setting the rules of the platform while also lobbying politicians on Facebook’s behalf. “I found many times that there were tensions [in meetings] because the civic-integrity team was like, ‘We’re operating off this oath; this is our mission and our goal,’” says Katie Harbath, a long-serving public-policy director at the company’s Washington, D.C., office who quit in March 2021. “And then you get into decisionmaking meetings, and all of a sudden things are going another way, because the rest of the company and leadership are not basing their decisions off those principles.”

Harbath admitted not always seeing eye to eye with Chakrabarti on matters of company policy, but praised his character. “Samidh is a man of integrity, to use the word,” she told TIME. “I personally saw times when he was like, ‘How can I run an integrity team if I’m not upholding integrity as a person?’”

Years before the 2020 election, research by integrity teams had shown Facebook’s group recommendations feature was radicalizing users by driving them toward polarizing political groups, according to the Journal. The company declined integrity teams’ requests to turn off the feature, BuzzFeed News reported. Then, just weeks before the vote, Facebook executives changed their minds and agreed to freeze political group recommendations. The company also tweaked its News Feed to make it less likely that users would see content that algorithms flagged as potential misinformation, part of temporary emergency “break glass” measures designed by integrity teams in the run-up to the vote. “Facebook changed those safety defaults in the run-up to the election because they knew they were dangerous,” Haugen testified to Senators on Tuesday. But they didn’t keep those safety measures in place long, she added. “Because they wanted that growth back, they wanted the acceleration on the platform back after the election, they returned to their original defaults. And the fact that they had to break the glass on Jan. 6, and turn them back on, I think that’s deeply problematic.”

In a statement, Facebook spokesperson Tom Reynolds rejected the idea that the company’s actions contributed to the events of Jan. 6. “In phasing in and then adjusting additional measures before, during and after the election, we took into account specific on-platforms signals and information from our ongoing, regular engagement with law enforcement,” he said. “When those signals changed, so did the measures. It is wrong to claim that these steps were the reason for Jan. 6—the measures we did need remained in place through February, and some like not recommending new, civic or political groups remain in place to this day. These were all part of a much longer and larger strategy to protect the election on our platform—and we are proud of that work.”

Read more: 4 Big Takeaways From the Facebook Whistleblower Congressional Hearing

Soon after the civic-integrity team was dissolved in December 2020, Chakrabarti took a leave of absence from Facebook. In August, he announced he was leaving for good. Other employees who had spent years working on platform-safety issues had begun leaving, too. In her testimony, Haugen said that several of her colleagues from civic integrity left Facebook in the same six-week period as her, after losing faith in the company’s pledge to spread their influence around the company. “Six months after the reorganization, we had clearly lost faith that those changes were coming,” she said.

After Haugen’s Senate testimony, Facebook’s director of policy communications Lena Pietsch suggested that Haugen’s criticisms were invalid because she “worked at the company for less than two years, had no direct reports, never attended a decision-point meeting with C-level executives—and testified more than six times to not working on the subject matter in question.” On Twitter, Chakrabarti said he was not supportive of company leaks but spoke out in support of the points Haugen raised at the hearing. “I was there for over 6 years, had numerous direct reports, and led many decision meetings with C-level execs, and I find the perspectives shared on the need for algorithmic regulation, research transparency, and independent oversight to be entirely valid for debate,” he wrote. “The public deserves better.”

Can Facebook’s latest moves protect the company?

Two months after disbanding the civic-integrity team, Facebook announced a sharp directional shift: it would begin testing ways to reduce the amount of political content in users’ News Feeds altogether. In August, the company said early testing of such a change among a small percentage of U.S. users was successful, and that it would expand the tests to several other countries. Facebook declined to provide TIME with further information about how its proposed down-ranking system for political content would work.

Many former employees who worked on integrity issues at the company are skeptical of the idea. “You’re saying that you’re going to define for people what political content is, and what it isn’t,” James Barnes, a former product manager on the civic-integrity team, said in an interview. “I cannot even begin to imagine all of the downstream consequences that nobody understands from doing that.”

Another former civic-integrity team member said that the amount of work required to design algorithms that could detect any political content in all the languages and countries in the world—and keeping those algorithms updated to accurately map the shifting tides of political debate—would be a task that even Facebook does not have the resources to achieve fairly and equitably. Attempting to do so would almost certainly result in some content deemed political being demoted while other posts thrived, the former employee cautioned. It could also incentivize certain groups to try to game those algorithms by talking about politics in nonpolitical language, creating an arms race for engagement that would privilege the actors with enough resources to work out how to win, the same person added.

Graeme Jennings—Bloomberg/Getty ImagesMark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer and founder of Facebook Inc., speaks via video conference during a House Judiciary Subcommittee hearing in Washington, D.C., on, July 29, 2020.

When Zuckerberg was hauled to testify in front of lawmakers after the Cambridge Analytica data scandal in 2018, Senators were roundly mocked on social media for asking basic questions such as how Facebook makes money if its services are free to users. (“Senator, we run ads” was Zuckerberg’s reply.) In 2021, that dynamic has changed. “The questions asked are a lot more informed,” says Sophie Zhang, a former Facebook employee who was fired in 2020 after she criticized Facebook for turning a blind eye to platform manipulation by political actors around the world.

“The sentiment is increasingly bipartisan” in Congress, Zhang adds. In the past, Facebook hearings have been used by lawmakers to grandstand on polarizing subjects like whether social media platforms are censoring conservatives, but this week they were united in their condemnation of the company. “Facebook has to stop covering up what it knows, and must change its practices, but there has to be government accountability because Facebook can no longer be trusted,” Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, chair of the Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, told TIME ahead of the hearing. His Republican counterpart Marsha Blackburn agreed, saying during the hearing that regulation was coming “sooner rather than later” and that lawmakers were “close to bipartisan agreement.”

As Facebook reels from the revelations of the past few days, it already appears to be reassessing product decisions. It has begun conducting reputational reviews of new products to assess whether the company could be criticized or its features could negatively affect children, the Journal reported Wednesday. It last week paused its Instagram Kids product amid the furor.

Whatever the future direction of Facebook, it is clear that discontent has been brewing internally. Haugen’s document leak and testimony have already sparked calls for stricter regulation and improved the quality of public debate about social media’s influence. In a post addressing Facebook staff on Wednesday, Zuckerberg put the onus on lawmakers to update Internet regulations, particularly relating to “elections, harmful content, privacy and competition.” But the real drivers of change may be current and former employees, who have a better understanding of the inner workings of the company than anyone—and the most potential to damage the business. —With reporting by Eloise Barry/London and Chad de Guzman/Hong Kong

New story in Technology from Time: Facebook Will Not Fix Itself

Five years ago, I embarked on a mission to help Facebook change its culture, business model and algorithms. I had been involved with the company in its early days as an adviser and investor. Since then, I and countless others have pressed Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg to reform Facebook. I communicated with them privately. I spoke out in public. I wrote for TIME in 2019, urging Facebook and Silicon Valley to adopt human-driven technology over addictive, dangerous algorithms. Nothing happened.

The last three weeks have changed the game. The courageous Facebook whistle-blower Frances Haugen has transformed the conversation about technology reform, accomplishing more than what I and others had achieved in years of effort. The documents she provided to the Wall Street Journal’s “Facebook Files” series confirmed that harms from Facebook’s business model are not an accident, but rather the inevitable result of a dangerous design. In many cases, the documents show, Facebook chose to double-down despite awareness of the harm it was causing and the pressure for change. It is clear that policymakers and the media have consistently underestimated the threat posed by Facebook, buying into the company’s rosy claims about the power of connecting the world and giving benefit of the doubt where none was deserved.
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Illustration by TIME (Source photo: Getty Images)

Facebook will not fix itself. All incentives direct the company to stay on its current course. And recent history would support the cynic’s view that our democracy and government are too broken to rein in any large company. But we are now at a point where further inaction by Congress will likely result in ongoing catastrophes from which we may not recover for a generation or more.

Read More: Here’s How to Fix Facebook, According to Former Employees and Leading Critics

Though it pays to keep one’s hopes and expectations in check when it comes to Congress, the present moment feels different from past technology scandals, especially those involving Facebook. Senators from both parties at this week’s hearing expressed support for Ms. Haugen’s testimony and for legislation to address it. In reality, few in Congress have a clear understanding of the regulatory path forward, but they know they want to find it.

Ms. Haugen expressed empathy for Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, but did not hesitate to note the moral failing of a CEO who prioritizes profits over the public good. I agree, but would add that this problem goes far beyond Zuckerberg and Facebook.

CEOs like Zuckerberg claim they have a mandate to maximize shareholder value. As with the phrase I’m just following orders, a single-minded focus on profits and shareholder value can be deployed to justify all manner of sins. Zuckerberg differs from other CEOs in the scope of harm his company can inflict and the absolute control he enjoys, but given the culture of business in America, I suspect far too many CEOs envy his power and in his shoes would pursue the same strategy, though they might be more astute about public relations.

Because many other companies are imitating Facebook in the hopes of profit, fixing Facebook will not be enough.

A huge portion of the U.S. economy operates according to the dictates of a system that Harvard University’s Shoshana Zuboff calls “surveillance capitalism.” Analogous to oil companies and other extraction businesses, surveillance capitalists assert property rights to every piece of data they touch, including data derived from public spaces and from the experience and property of others. The economics of surveillance capitalism come from converting human experience into data, building models for every human from that data, and using those models to predict and influence behavior. Advertisers pay for those predictions. Surveillance capitalists also use the models to inform recommendation engines that manipulate choices and sometimes behavior. It is immensely profitable because humans make decisions in predictable ways, which facilitates manipulation.

Read More: A New Campaign Asks Facebook Users to Log Off. Will It Have an Impact?

Everything we do on a smartphone, every financial transaction we make, every trip, every prescription and medical test, every action we take on the Internet or in apps is tracked, and most of it is available for purchase in a data marketplace. Companies throughout the economy use machine learning to look for patterns in this data and artificial intelligence to apply those patterns to improve their business. No one in this process gives a thought to the impact on the human beings affected by their influence and manipulation. Their only goal is to maximize shareholder value.

Personal autonomy and democracy are under assault from surveillance capitalism. And yet today’s tech industry is largely unregulated, having emerged in the midst of an era of deregulation and defunding of enforcement agencies. This has allowed tech giants to behave as unelected governments. Their communications systems have become central to our way of life, as the impact of this week’s Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp outage underscores, but they have their thumb on the scale, amplifying content that triggers fear and outrage because doing so maximizes profits. Fear and outrage fuel anger, which undermines democracy.

Matt McClain—Getty ImagesFacebook whistle-blower Frances Haugen appears before the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Subcommittee in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 5, 2021.

Every time Facebook faces pressure for change, it does something that sounds helpful but is not. The most outrageous example is the algorithm change in 2018 that reduced the amplification of journalism in favor of posts from friends and family. Facebook claimed the change would increase meaningful interaction, but what it really did was increase engagement by increasing the relative weight of hate speech, disinformation and conspiracy theories. At this point, any defense of continued self-regulation seems naive.

Facebook likes to shift responsibility to others, including users, but users cannot be faulted for the harms caused by the platform, nor should they be expected to fix this. Countless families, small businesses, patients and artists are dependent on Facebook. The good parts of Facebook do not require surveillance capitalism, but without it, Facebook the company would be far less profitable.

That leaves regulation. Congress will be tempted to target legislative reform at Facebook, but that would be a mistake. We need legislation to address three related problems across the entire technology world: safety, privacy and competition.

The sad truth is that the unregulated tech industry produces products that are unsafe. Congress has faced the challenge of dangerous products in the past. When the food and medicine industries were unsafe, Congress created the Food and Drug Administration. When petrochemical companies dumped toxic waste indiscriminately, Congress approved a series of environmental laws. Just like tech companies today, the affected industries claimed they would not be able to operate with regulation, but that turned out to be wrong. Now we need something like an FDA for technology products, designed to prevent harmful technologies from coming to market. For qualifying products, it would set safety standards, require annual safety audits and certification as a condition for every product, and impose huge financial penalties for any harms that result. There should also be amendments to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act to create better incentives for Internet platforms.

Congress also needs to protect people’s privacy from relentless surveillance. My preference would be for Congress to ban surveillance capitalism just as it banned child labor in 1938. (The many industries that employed child labor complained then that they could not survive without it.) At a minimum, Congress must ban third-party use of sensitive data, such as that related to health, location, financial transactions, web browsing and app data.

The third area for legislation is competition, where Congress needs to update antitrust laws for the 21st century. The six-hour outage of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp illustrated for many one downside of monopoly: absolute dependence on a service.

Until very recently, Zuckerberg could count on the loyalty of employees. Few pushed back after the company was accused of playing a harmful role in Brexit, the 2016 U.S. election, the ethnic cleansing in Myanmar, or the terrorism in Christchurch and Pittsburgh. It was not until 2020—when Facebook was used by white supremacists to spread hate after the murder of George Floyd, by allies of the Trump Administration to downplay the significance of COVID-19, by Trump loyalists to undermine confidence in the election, and then in 2021 by the antivaccination movement to undermine the nation’s pandemic response—that employees openly challenged management in significant ways. Despite this, Zuckerberg continues to speak as though Facebook has done nothing wrong. In response to the whistle-blower’s Senate testimony, he said:

“I’m sure many of you have found the recent coverage hard to read because it just doesn’t reflect the company we know. We care deeply about issues like safety, well-being and mental health. 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.”

All of this may be true in Mark Zuckerberg’s mind, but the design of Facebook’s business model suggests that growth and profits are the only factors driving “the company we know.”

Based on the evidence of the past five years, one might say that Internet platforms have launched an attack against democracy and self-determination. It is a battle they will win unless voters and policymakers join forces to reassert their power. We have been losing the battle since 2016, but I would like to believe that this week was a turning point.

We have the power. The question is whether we have the courage to use it.

—With reporting by Nik Popli/Washington