Facebook whistleblower accuses tech titan of ignoring foreign espionage operations

Chinese spies are using Facebook to find Uyghur Muslims around the world, according to a whistleblower who argues the tech titan's neglect of such behavior is a national security risk to the United States.

"My team directly worked on tracking Chinese participation on the platform surveilling, say, Uyghur populations in places around the world," Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen told a Senate Commerce subcommittee this week. "You could actually find the Chinese based on them doing these kinds of things."

Those remarks sent a jolt through lawmakers, who came prepared for a discussion about "protecting kids online," as the hearing title promised.

Sen. Dan Sullivan, an Alaska Republican who also sits on the Armed Services Committee, presented Haugen with an open-ended question about authoritarian exploitation of Facebook. She underscored that multiple foreign intelligence services have used the company to their advantage.

"We also saw active participation of, say, the Iran government doing espionage on other state actors," Haugen said. "So, this is definitely a thing that is happening, and I believe Facebook's consistent understaffing of the counterespionage, information operations, and counterterrorism teams is a national security issue."

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Her testimony coincided with a major outage at Facebook that rendered the platform widely inaccessible for several hours on Tuesday. That technical crisis drew a sharp response from Turkey and Russia, both of which issued statements calling for the establishment of social media alternatives to Facebook.

"The problem we have seen showed us how our data are in danger, how quickly and easily our social liberties can be limited," a spokesman for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan wrote on Twitter.

A prominent Russian diplomat likewise cited the Facebook outage as proof that "we need our own social networks and internet platforms."

Both Turkey and Russia have a poor reputation for respecting civil liberties, according to independent watchdogs, such as Freedom House. In that light, Facebook appears likely to face pressure from both U.S. officials and authoritarian regimes who have exploited the company and fear that U.S. spies might do the same to them.

"Our social media has been used as a useful idiot for authoritarian regimes," the American Enterprise Institute's Ivana Stradner told the Washington Examiner. "But on the other [hand], they're absolutely terrified of their own wrongdoings ... They know how those things operate — what they are doing in the West. And they have this paranoia that the United States or the Western allies are going to do, or are already doing, the same thing [as] the Russians or the Chinese. And this is why they believe that an open internet is a threat to domestic stability."

Haugen's testimony roused Sen. Richard Blumenthal, the Connecticut Democrat who chairs the full Senate Commerce Committee, to propose convening another hearing devoted to the national security ramifications.

"We may want to discuss this issue ... at least informally and if you'd want to come back for another hearing," Blumenthal said.

Haugen emphasized the company knows how foreign spies exploit the platform but hasn't assigned enough internal monitors to disrupt such operations.

"Facebook is very aware that this is happening on the platform," she said. "And I believe the fact that Congress doesn't get a report of exactly how many people are working on these things internally is unacceptable."