Facebook Exec Nick Clegg Waffles on Whether the Social Network Amplified Jan. 6th Under Intense Grilling From CNN’s Dana Bash: Can’t Say ‘Yes or No’

CNN’s Dana Bash took Facebook’s Vice-President for Global Affairs, Nick Clegg, to task over the recent revelations and accusations involving the social media platform.

Bash interviewed Clegg on Sunday for State of the Union, where the conversation focused on Facebook’s awareness of social media’s negative impact on children, plus the allegations of whistleblower Frances Haugen. The interview comes after Haugen testified before Congress with her claims that the social network constantly puts profits ahead of public safety, and that they facilitated several other detrimental impacts on society.

Clegg responded to Haugen’s claims, and argued that Facebook is trying to improve itself. Bash, in response, brought up the incoming meeting Haugen is going to have with the January 6th committee. This prompted Bash to ask: “Did Facebook’s algorithms amplify or spread pro-insurrection voices ahead of January 6?”

Clegg replied that Facebook operates with “hundreds of thousands” of algorithms, and he argued that there have been a great deal of “misleading discussions” about what they do.

But what the ranking algorithms do — in other words, that’s the crucial algorithms that help decide what you see more prominently on your news feed, on Facebook, than other pieces of content. If you remove the algorithms, which I think is one of of Francis Haugen’s central recommendations, the first thing that would happen is people would see more, not less, hate speech. More, not less, misinformation. These algorithms are precisely designed to work like giant spam filters to identify and deprecate bad content. Of course it has a downsides, but it also has very powerful positive effect.

Bash acknowledged Clegg’s point, but she once again asked if Facebook’s algorithms fueled the events of January 6th.

“Given we have thousands of algorithms and millions of people using this, I can’t give you a yes or no answer to the individual, personalized feeds that each person uses,” Clegg said. He went on by insisting that Facebook cooperates with law enforcement, and that the responsibility for January 6th lies with the perpetrators and those who encouraged their lawless action.

“But is it a problem that Facebook, that you’re not really sure if your platform allowed it to fester and amplify what ended up as this huge attack?” Bash asked.

“What I was simply saying is that the algorithm, the whole point, of course, of Facebook is that each person’s newsfeed is individual to them. It’s like an individual fingerprint, and that’s basically determined by the interaction of your choices, your friends, your family, the groups you choose to be part of,” Clegg said.

He continued:

I can’t give a generic answer to each person’s individual feed. What I can say is that where we see content we think is relevant to the investigations of law enforcement, of course we cooperate with them. But if I may, if our algorithms are so nefarious as some people suggest, why is it that it’s precisely those systems that have succeeded to reduce hate speech, the prevalence of hate speech on our platforms to as little as 0.05 percent? That means that for every 10,000 bits of content, you would only see 5 bits of hate speech.

Watch above, via CNN.