New York (CNN) — Apple on Thursday posted its fourth consecutive quarter of year-over-year sales declines as the iPhone maker continues to struggle with slower device sales amid an uncertain economic environment.

The company reported $89.5 billion in sales for the three months ended September 30, down 1% from the same period in the prior year and essentially in line with the $84.3 billion Wall Street analysts had expected. Despite the sales dip, Apple’s net income from the quarter grew nearly 11% year-over-year to $22.96 billion, beating analysts’ projections.

Apple (AAPL) shares fell more than 1% in after-hours trading following the report.

“During the September quarter, we continue to face an uneven macroeconomic environment,” Apple CEO Tim Cook said in an analyst call Thursday. “We’ve continued to invest in the future … We’ve adapted continuously to circumstances beyond our control, while being thoughtful and deliberate on spending.”

Revenue from Apple’s products segment dipped more than 5% year-over-year during the September quarter, driven in particular by declines in Mac and iPad sales. (CFO Luca Maestri noted on the analyst call that the product segment faced a difficult comparison with the year-ago quarter, when the company fulfilled a large number of orders that had been backed up due to an earlier supply disruption.)

iPhone revenue, however, ticked up by 3% from the year-ago quarter to $43.8 billion, marking a September quarter iPhone sales record.

Apple also hit a record number of installed devices actively in use across all of its products and geographic segments, Maestri said on the analyst call.

The sales numbers may provide an early indication of the performance of the iPhone 15, following concerns from analysts that consumers would have fewer incentives to upgrade because the new lineup featured only minimal improvements. However, the iPhone 15 lineup went on sale only eight days before the end of the September quarter, so its real impact likely won’t be felt until Apple reports for the crucial holiday quarter. The company also announced upgrades to its laptops and desktop computers earlier this week.

“We believe this precarious macro [economic] environment, combined with a mature market, will lead to an uninspiring iPhone 15 cycle,” Brian White, an analyst at Monness Crespi Hardt said in a research note ahead of Apple’s Thursday earnings report.

Cook said Thursday that “it’s really too early to call the iPhone [15] cycle … it’s really too early to tell what the upgrade rates will be and what the switcher rates will be.”

Analysts also pointed to the 2.5% year-over-year dip in Apple’s China sales during the September quarter as a sign that the iPhone maker could be losing ground in that crucial market.

“Apple’s worrying China sales figures indicate demand for its high-end iPhones is slowing more than expected in the face of rising competition from local companies, including Huawei,” Investing.com senior analyst Jesse Cohen said in an emailed statement following Thursday’s report.

Cook, however, told analysts that Apple faced a difficult foreign exchange rate in China, and that iPhone sales in fact hit a September quarter record in mainland China. He said the sales dip in the region was largely caused by declines in Mac and iPad revenue, similar to the company’s overall results.

Sales growth in Apple’s services segment, however, continues to partially offset the declines in device revenue growth. Revenue from the services unit, which includes Apple’s subscription products like Apple TV+, notched more than 14% year-over-year gains in the September quarter, hitting an all-time quarterly record of more than $22 billion.

And the company could see an additional boost from the services business in the December quarter after Apple last month hiked the prices of its Apple TV+, Apple Arcade and Apple News subscriptions by $2 or $3 per month each.

Apple expects total company revenue in the December quarter to be essentially flat from the prior year, Maestri said, adding that the 2023 December quarter is a week shorter than it was a year ago.

Cook on Thursday also teased the launch of its Vision Pro mixed reality headset, which is expected to be available to consumers early next year. He said developers have been working with the product in select developer labs Apple set up around the world to build apps, and “there’s some real blow away kinds of things that are coming out.” Cook added that the Vision Pro will initially be sold only in Apple stores, so the company can educate consumers about how to use them.

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New York (CNN) — Nnete Matima said she was attracted to work at TikTok because of how the social media platform was “really built upon Black culture” and the work of Black creators.

She saw and welcomed TikTok’s public pledge of support for the Black community in the wake of the 2020 police murder of George Floyd and applied to work for the company because she felt its corporate values “really resonated with me,” Matima told CNN.

Shortly after she began working at TikTok-parent company ByteDance last year, however, she alleges she encountered “toxicity and racism” in the workplace. Her manager would refer to her as a “black snake” behind her back and set unrealistic and uneven expectations for her compared to her white peers, Matima claims. The mistreatment only got worse, she said, after she spoke up about it via human resources channels.

Matima is one of two Black former ByteDance employees who together filed a formal complaint with the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on Thursday. Their complaint asks the agency to investigate alleged racial discrimination and retaliation against Black workers at the social media giant.

Corporate America has long come under fire for racism in the workplace, especially in the wake of the racial reckoning that swept through the nation in 2020. The criticism is especially pointed for technology companies, where having employees with diverse perspectives is especially crucial because tech products have faced accusations of perpetuating racial and ethnic discrimination.

Matima, who is based in New York City, and fellow former employee Joël Carter, who is based in Austin, Texas, alleged in the proposed class action complaint that they each faced repeated instances of discrimination at work and then faced retaliation when they raised concerns about it.

“Rather than holding anyone accountable, TikTok denied the blatant discrimination that Ms. Matima and Mr. Carter suffered, failed to stop it from continuing, engaged in sham ‘investigations’ of their complaints, took away their work, and then terminated Ms. Matima and Mr. Carter in retaliation for complaining about race discrimination and mistreatment,” the complaint states.

“We are asking the EEOC to investigate TikTok’s pattern or practice of retaliation against workers who complain about discrimination,” the complaint adds.

CNN has reached out to TikTok for its response to the allegations in the complaint.

TikTok skyrocketed in popularity in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic and as of this year has amassed more than 150 million American users. As the app has become more entrenched in American culture, it has also faced mounting scrutiny from US lawmakers over perceived security concerns due to its China-based parent company’s ties to Beijing. Talks of an outright US ban of the app have simmered in Washington, DC, since the Trump era but have largely subsided in recent months as lawmakers turn their attention to the rise of generative AI out of Silicon Valley.

Even TikTok itself has also acknowledged the important role that Black users play on the platform — and its need to support them.

“Black creators inspire mainstream culture and continue to define what’s next — from creating viral moments and pioneering new spaces in fashion and music, to advocating for others and organizing for a better future, they have always been at the forefront of innovation,” the company said in a statement last January.

Two years earlier, TikTok had acknowledged concerns that Black users felt “unsafe, unsupported, or suppressed” and vowed to “actively promote and protect” diversity on the platform.

‘Dehumanizing and demoralizing’

Carter, who began working at TikTok in June 2021, told CNN in an interview that experience at the company was “dehumanizing” and “demoralizing.”

Carter was initially hired as a risk analyst responsible for managing the safety of TikTok’s ad ecosystem, but was transferred to the platform’s ad policy team as a policy manager eight months later. Shortly after starting his new role, Carter alleges, he discovered that he was being significantly underpaid compared to his colleagues. He says he raised these concerns to human resources and his department leader. Carter was at the time the only Black employee on his 80-person ad policy team, the complaint states.

Carter’s manager prevented him from attending important meetings and took credit for Carter’s work, according to the complaint. Carter alleges that in response to his complaints, his role at the company “was changed and severely diminished,” prompting him to again alert human resources that he was concerned about discrimination and retaliation.

The complaint filed with the EEOC shares parts of Carter’s April 2022 performance evaluation, where he was given an overall score of: “Exceeds expectations.” A reviewer described Carter as “open and humble above all” and a “great teammate.” He was “happy to provide assistance or guidance whenever needed. He never had an ego and was always open to collaboration and feedback,” the reviewer added, per the complaint.

But after Carter began raising concerns at work about racial discrimination, he alleges he was retaliated against in a performance review in April 2023.

He was labeled as “tense” and “angry” and accused of “slamming doors” in the office in that review, the complaint states. But Carter says he never slammed a door in the office. In fact, he says, the doors at the office were hydraulic — not even capable of being slammed.

Carter told CNN that he felt his managers were trying “to establish this narrative of me about being the ‘angry Black man.’” Carter grew emotional as he talked to CNN about the pain and “the historic significance of using that kind of inflammatory language, especially when it’s unfounded.”

His experience at work deeply impacted his mental health, and for the first time in his life he began seeing a psychiatrist and dealing with symptoms of depression for “months on end,” he said. “It was like overwhelming feelings of hopelessness and helplessness.”

Matima — who worked in sales for Lark, ByteDance’s workplace communication division — similarly alleges she was treated differently from the colleagues on her team “who were nearly all white,” according to the complaint. For example, Matima says she was not given adequate time to complete required onboarding courses before being asked to start her work, so she had to finish the courses during nights and weekends. By contrast, Matima’s white colleagues “were given ample time during normal work hours to complete their training before they were required to start their sales outreach,” the complaint states.

In January 2023, the complaint alleges, Matima was told by a colleague that her manager and other colleagues “commonly referred” to her as a “black snake.”

“This outrageous ‘black snake’ nickname was not only racially derogatory and inflammatory, but also suggested that Ms. Matima is a deceitful, untrustworthy, and sneaky person,” the complaint states.

Matima and Carter both allege that multiple requests to switch managers were denied and that their complaints to the company’s human resources department were not adequately investigated and managed.

Both Matima and Carter were ultimately terminated by TikTok in August.

Now Matima says she feels a “moral obligation” to share the experiences publicly. “When there is injustice happening, it festers in the dark and the shadows,” she said. “By going public, we can inspire others who are still suffering in there to stand up and speak out.”

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New York (CNN) — TikTok on Monday filed a suit against Montana over a bill that would ban the popular short-form video app in the state starting early next year.

TikTok alleges that the ban violates the US Constitution, including the First Amendment, as well as other federal laws, according to a complaint filed in Montana District Court. The company also claims concerns that the Chinese government could access the data of US TikTok users – which are a key motivation behind the ban – are “unfounded.”

The bill was signed by Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte last week, and would impose a fine of $10,000 per day on TikTok or app stores for making the app available to personal devices in the state starting on January 1, 2024.

“We are challenging Montana’s unconstitutional TikTok ban to protect our business and the hundreds of thousands of TikTok users in Montana,” TikTok spokesperson Brooke Oberwetter said in a statement. “We believe our legal challenge will prevail based on an exceedingly strong set of precedents and facts.”

Emily Flower, a spokesperson for Montana’s Attorney General, told CNN: “We expected legal challenges and are fully prepared to defend the law that helps protect Montanans’ privacy and security.”

The Montana law stems from growing criticism of TikTok over its ties to China through its parent company, ByteDance. Many US officials have expressed fears that the Chinese government could potentially access US data via TikTok for spying purposes, though there is no evidence that the Chinese government has ever done so. Some federal lawmakers have also called for a ban.

Montana’s ban went a step beyond other states that have restricted TikTok from government devices. But legal and technology experts say there are challenges for Montana, or any state, to enforce such a ban. Even if the law is allowed to stand, the practicalities of the internet may make it impossible to keep TikTok out of the hands of users.

TikTok said in the complaint that the app is used by “hundreds of thousands” of people in Montana to “communicate with each other and others around the world on an endless variety of topics, from business to politics to the arts.”

“This unprecedented and extreme step of banning a major platform for First Amendment speech, based on unfounded speculation about potential foreign government access to user data and the content of the speech, is flatly inconsistent with the constitution,” TikTok said in the complaint.

TikTok is seeking for the court to invalidate and permanently enjoin Montana from enforcing the ban.

The legal challenge by TikTok is an indicator of the hurdles that Montana and other lawmakers could face in attempting to restrict the platform in the United States. A group of TikTok creators also sued Montana last week over the state’s ban, saying it violates their First Amendment rights.

– CNN’s Brian Fung contributed to this report.

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(CNN) — Unlike many other social media platforms, Snapchat has been available only on mobile since its launch over a decade ago. But on Monday, the company launched a web-based version of the popular messaging app.

The goal is to give users the freedom to switch between their phones and computers, all while continuing their conversations on the platform. But the new desktop option could also help Snapchat take on a surprising rival: Zoom.

While Snapchat is known for letting users send disappearing chats and photos, called snaps, video calling has become a popular feature of the app, according to the company. Snapchat said its app hosts more than 100 million video calls each month with up to 15 participants each. Now, it hopes that service will become easier and more pleasant to use when people join those calls from a desktop.

The idea is similar to video calling services such as Zoom, which exploded in popularity during the pandemic, but with some selling points unique to Snapchat. Users will be able to initiate calls more quickly and easily because they’re already connected to friends and can see when others are online, according to the company.Snapchat’s signature photo lenses — the ones that can make users appear to have dog ears, freckles or other features — will also soon be available for video calls on the web version.

Like with the app, the web version of Snapchat opens directly to the camera to encourage users to send photos to friends. In a sidebar, users will see a list of their recent friend conversations, where they can open snaps or start a chat. The web version won’t include all the features of the mobile app, such as the “Snap Map” where users can track their friends or the discover section — at least to start, according to the company.

“With so many in our community spending more time online, whether it is for remote learning or working, streaming or just plain browsing — we saw a huge opportunity to make it easier for our community to stay connected throughout their day,” a spokesperson for Snap, the app’s parent company, said in a statement.

To protect users’ safety and privacy, Snapchat for web prohibits users from taking screenshots of chats or snaps (the app alerts users if someone screenshots their chat or photo). The company also created a “privacy screen” to hide the Snapchat window if users click away.

The launch comes as Snap, the parent company of Snapchat, has been pummeled on Wall Street after posting a larger than expected loss in its most recent earnings report and later warning investors that it had slashed its upcoming quarterly forecast due to a worsening economy.Shares of Snap, which is set to report second quarter earnings later this week, have tumbled 70% since the start of this year.

Last month, Snap introduced a new paid subscription service called Snapchat+ with the potential to boost its revenue.The web version may be a draw for the new, $3.99 per month subscription option. At launch, the web-based version of Snapchat will be available to all users in Australia and New Zealand and to Snapchat+ users in the United States, United Kingdom and Canada. The service will soon roll out toSnapchat+ subscribers in France, Germany, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

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CEO Mark Zuckerberg kicked off Facebook’s quarterly earnings call by addressing the latest wave of coverage based on a trove of leaked internal documents on Monday.

“Good faith criticism helps us get better, but my view is that we are seeing a coordinated effort to selectively use leaked documents to paint a false picture of our company,” Zuckerberg said. “The reality is that we have an open culture that encourages discussion and research on our work so we can make progress on many complex issues that are not specific to just us.”

The company’s results come amid perhaps the biggest crisis in the social media giant’s 17-year history. Tens of thousands of pages of internal documents leaked by whistleblower Frances Haugen informed the Wall Street Journal’s “Facebook Files” series, and on Monday, a flood of additional news coverage by a consortium of 17 US news organizations, as well as hearings with US and UK lawmakers. The documents provide the deepest look yet at many of Facebook’s biggest problems, including its struggles to regulate hate speech and misinformation, the use of its platform by human traffickers, research on harms to young people and more.

Facebook has pushed back on many of the reports, saying they are misleading and mischaracterize its research and actions. Zuckerberg last commented on the situation following Haugen’s Senate hearing earlier this month, in a statement in which he tried to discredit the whistleblower. Still, on Friday, another former Facebook employee anonymously filed a complaint against the company to the SEC, with allegations similar to Haugen’s.

But despite all the bad headlines, the company reminded investors on Monday that it continues to be a money-making machine.

Facebook reported $29 billion in revenue for the three months ended in September, up 35% from the same period a year earlier. The company posted nearly $9.2 billion in profit, up 17% from the year prior. The number of people using Facebook’s family of apps grew 12% year-over-year, to nearly 3.6 billion during the quarter.

The results were nearly in line with Wall Street analysts’ projections. Facebook’s stock rose as much as 3% in after-hours trading Monday following the earnings report, before falling to around 1% higher.

Facebook is no stranger to PR crises. And in most cases, Facebook’s business has continued to chug along at a healthy clip despite outcry from regulators and the public.

But this time could be different. Facebook’s massive ad business is already in a vulnerable state because of recent changes to Apple’s app tracking rules. Apple’s iOS 14.5 software update, which went into effect in April, requires that users give explicit permission for apps to track their behavior and sell their personal data, such as age, location, spending habits and health information, to advertisers. Facebook has aggressively pushed back against the changes and warned investors last year that the update could hurt its business if many users opt out of tracking.

On Monday, Facebook warned that the iOS 14 changes could create “continued headwinds” in the fourth quarter of 2021.

“We’ve been open about the fact that there are headwinds coming and we experienced that in Q3. The biggest is the impact of iOS 14 changes,” COO Sheryl Sandberg said on the company’s earnings call Monday. “As a result, we’ve encountered two challenges: one is that the accuracy of our ad targeting decreased, which increased the cost of driving outcomes for our advertisers, and the other is that measuring those outcomes became more difficult.”

While much of the world spent the day focused on Facebook’s real-world harms, the company hinted to investors in the report that it wants them looking forward, not backward. Starting in the fourth quarter, the company plans to break out Facebook Reality Labs — its division dedicated to augmented and virtual reality services — as a separate reporting segment from its family of apps, which includes Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook’s namesake social network.

CFO Dave Wehner said Facebook is investing so heavily in this newer division that it will reduce “our overall operating profit in 2021 by approximately $10 billion.”

In a statement with the results, Zuckerberg also focused on what’s next: “I’m excited about our roadmap, especially around creators, commerce, and helping to build the metaverse.”

During the earnings call, Wall Street analysts asked much more about new Facebook initiatives and products like the metaverse and Instagram Reels than about Monday’s news coverage, a reminder that investors often prioritize the company’s potential for growth over its potential for harm. Evercore ISI did ask Zuckerberg to evaluate the company’s progress on building artificial intelligence that can identify problematic content.

Zuckerberg pointed to the company’s quarterly transparency reports, which identify “what percentage of the content that we act on is our AI … finding rather than people having to report it.” He said that “in most of these categories … 90-plus-percent of the content that we act on, we’re identifying largely through the AI system.” However, he noted that the success of its systems can vary by category.

“Some of the categories, like hate speech, have been harder,” he said, because “we’re operating in around 150 languages around the world … there’s a lot of cultural nuance in this.”

Zuckerberg also attempted to make a rallying call to his staff.

“I know there is a lot of scrutiny of our efforts, and I guess I just want to say to the team and the people who work on this that I’m really proud of the progress that they make,” he said.

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Frances Haugen, a 37-year-old former Facebook product manager who worked on civic integrity issues at the company, faced questions from a Commerce subcommittee about what Facebook-owned Instagram knew about its effects on young users, among other issues.

“I am here today because I believe that Facebook’s products harm children, stoke division, and weaken our democracy,” she said during her opening remarks. “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. Congressional action is needed. They won’t solve this crisis without your help.”

She emphasized that she came forward “at great personal risk” because she believes “we still have time to act. But we must act now.”

Urging Congress to take action

Haugen’s identity as the Facebook whistleblower was revealed on “60 Minutes” Sunday night. She previously shared a series of documents with regulators and the Wall Street Journal, which published a multi-part investigation showing that Facebook was aware of problems with its apps, including the negative effects of misinformation and the harm caused by Instagram, especially to young girls.

“When we realized tobacco companies were hiding the harms it caused, the government took action,” she said in her opening remarks. “When we figured out cars were safer with seat belts, the government took action. And today, the government is taking action against companies that hid evidence on opioids. I implore you to do the same here.”

Following the hearing, Facebook issued a statement attempting to discredit Haugen. “Today, a Senate Commerce subcommittee held a hearing with a former product manager at Facebook who worked for 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,” the statement, tweeted by spokesperson Andy Stone, read. “We don’t agree with her characterization of the many issues she testified about. Despite all this, we agree on one thing; it’s time to begin to create standard rules for the internet.”

Facebook is no stranger to scandals, and it’s not the first time the company has been the subject of Congressional hearings. Nor is it the first time Facebook’s public image has been shaken by a whistleblower. But Haugen’s documents and upcoming testimony come amid broader scrutiny of Facebook’s power and data privacy practices, and have already spurred bipartisan criticism of the company’s influence on children. It remains to be seen, however, if it will create momentum for any meaningful regulation.

From outage to outrage

The testimony came after a tumultuous day for the company. Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram went down for about six hours on Monday.

In her testimony, Haugen said, “Yesterday, we saw Facebook get taken off the internet. I don’t know why it went down, but I know that for more than 5 hours Facebook wasn’t used to deepen divides, destabilize democracies, and make young girls and women feel bad about their bodies.”

She added: “It also means that millions of small businesses weren’t able to reach potential customers and countless photos of new babies weren’t joyously celebrated by family and friends around the world. I believe in the potential of Facebook. We can have social media we enjoy, that connects us, without tearing apart our democracy, putting our children in danger and sowing ethnic violence across the world. We can do better.”

Beyond the documents, there’s also the power of Haugen’s personal backstory. She started at Facebook in 2019 after previously working for other prominent tech companies including Google and Pinterest. She spoke with the Wall Street Journal about losing a friendship due to online misinformation and how it impacted the way she thinks about social media. She also told the publication her goal in speaking out isn’t to bring down Facebook but to “save it.”

About a month ago, Haugen reportedly filed at least eight complaints with the Securities and Exchange Commission alleging that the company is hiding research about its shortcomings from investors and the public. She also shared the documents with regulators and the Journal, which published a multi-part investigation showing that Facebook was aware of problems with its apps, including the negative effects of misinformation and the harm caused by Instagram, especially to young girls.

Facebook issues will ‘haunt a generation,’ Senator says

Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal, who chairs the Senate Commerce subcommittee on consumer protection, expressed “heartfelt gratitude” to Haugen for “standing up to one of the most powerful, implacable corporate giants in the history of the world.”

He added: “The damage to self-interest and self-worth inflicted by Facebook today will haunt a generation.”

Antigone Davis, Facebook’s global head of safety, was grilled by members of the same Senate subcommittee last week following the Journal report about the impact its apps have on younger users. Davis, who identified herself as a mother and former teacher, pushed back on the idea that the report was a “bombshell” and did not commit to publicly releasing a full research report, noting potential “privacy considerations.” She said Facebook is “looking for ways to release more research.”

The Journal report, and the renewed pressure from lawmakers in its aftermath, also appeared to force Instagram to rethink its plans to introduce a version of its service for kids under 13. Days before the hearing, Instagram said it would press pause on the project.

“Facebook’s actions make clear that we cannot trust it to police itself,” Blumenthal said in the statement Sunday. “We must consider stronger oversight, effective protections for children, and tools for parents, among the needed reforms.”

On Tuesday night, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg released a 1,316-word statement on his personal Facebook page addressing Monday’s Facebook outage and Haugen’s testimony. He said, in part, that instead of ignoring that young people use technology, tech companies “should build experiences that meet their needs while also keeping them safe.”

National security concerns — and future hearings

During her testimony, Haugen said,”Congress can change the rules Facebook plays by and stop the many harms it is now causing.”

Haugen, whose last role at Facebook was as a product manager supporting the company’s counter espionage team, was asked by one senator whether Facebook is used by “authoritarian or terrorist-based leaders” around the world. She said such use of the platforms is “definitely” happening, and that Facebook is “very aware” of it.

“My team directly worked on tracking Chinese participation on the platform, surveilling, say, Uyghur populations in places around the world. You could actually find the Chinese based on them doing these kinds of things,” Haugen said. “We also saw active participation of, say, the Iran government doing espionage on other state actors.”

She went on to call Facebook’s “consistent understaffing” of counter-espionage and counter-terrorism teams a “national security issue.”

“I have strong national security concerns about how Facebook operates today,” Haugen said.

Her comments on national security hinted at what may be next for Congress’ inquiry based on the internal document leaks. Haugen said she already has plans to speak with other parts of Congress about those concerns, and Blumenthal suggested that Facebook’s impact on national security could be the subject of a future subcommittee hearing with Haugen.

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The 37-year-old former Facebook product manager who worked on civic integrity issues at the company says the documents show that Facebook knows its platforms are used to spread hate, violence and misinformation, and that the company has tried to hide that evidence.

“The thing I saw at Facebook over and over again was there were conflicts of interest between what was good for the public and what was good for Facebook, and Facebook over and over again chose to optimize for its own interests, like making more money,” Haugen told “60 Minutes.”

“60 Minutes” correspondent Scott Pelley quoted one internal Facebook document as saying: “We have evidence from a variety of sources that hate speech, divisive political speech and misinformation on Facebook and the family of apps are affecting societies around the world.”

About a month ago, Haugen filed at least eight complaints with the Securities and Exchange Commission alleging that the company is hiding research about its shortcomings from investors and the public. She also shared the documents with the Wall Street Journal, which published a multi-part investigation showing that Facebook was aware of problems with its apps, including the negative effects of misinformation and the harm caused, especially to young girls, by Instagram.

Haugen, who started at Facebook in 2019 after previously working for other tech giants like Google and Pinterest, is set to testify on Tuesday before the Senate Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety, and Data Security.

“I’ve seen a bunch of social networks, and it was substantially worse at Facebook than anything I’ve seen before,” Haugen said. “At some point in 2021, I realized I’m going to have to do this in a systemic way, that I’m going to have to get out enough [documents] that no one can question that this is real.”

Facebook has aggressively pushed back against the reports, calling many of the claims “misleading” and arguing that its apps do more good than harm.

“Every day our teams have to balance protecting the ability of billions of people to express themselves openly with the need to keep our platform a safe and positive place,” Facebook spokesperson Lena Pietsch said in a statement to CNN Business immediately following the “60 Minutes” interview. “We continue to make significant improvements to tackle the spread of misinformation and harmful content. To suggest we encourage bad content and do nothing is just not true.”

Several hours after the interview aired, Pietsch released a more than 700-word statement laying out what it called “missing facts” from the segment, and saying the interview “used select company materials to tell a misleading story about the research we do to improve our products.”

A spokesperson for “60 Minutes” did not immediately respond to a request for comment from CNN Business on Facebook’s claims.

On Sunday morning ahead of the “60 Minutes” interview, Facebook Vice President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg told CNN’s Brian Stelter that “there is no perfection on social media as much as in any other walk of life.”

“We do a huge amount of research, we share it with external researchers as much as we can, but do remember there is … a world of difference between doing a peer-reviewed exercise in cooperation with other academics and preparing papers internally to provoke and inform internal discussion,” Clegg said.

Haugen said she believes Facebook Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg “never set out to make a hateful platform, but he has allowed choices to be made where the side effects of those choices are that hateful and polarizing content gets more distribution and more reach.”

Whistleblower revealed

Haugen said she was recruited by Facebook in 2019 and took the job to work on addressing misinformation. But after the company decided to dissolve its civic integrity team shortly after the 2020 Presidential Election, her feelings about the company started to change.

She suggested that this decision — and moves by the company to turn off other election protection measures such as misinformation prevention tools — allowed the platform to be used to help organize the January 6 riot on Capitol Hill.

“They basically said, ‘Oh good, we made it through the election, there weren’t riots, we can get rid of civic integrity now,'” she said. “Fast forward a couple of months, and we had the Insurrection. When they got rid of civic integrity, it was the moment where I was like, ‘I don’t trust that they’re willing to actually invest what needs to be invested to keep Facebook from being dangerous.'”

Facebook says the civic integrity team’s work was distributed to other units when it was dissolved. Facebook Vice President of Integrity Guy Rosen said on Twitter Sunday night that the group was integrated into other teams so the “work pioneered for elections could be applied even further.”

The social media company’s algorithm that’s designed to show users content that they’re most likely to engage with is responsible for many of its problems, Haugen said.

“One of the consequences of how Facebook is picking out that content today is that it is optimizing for content that gets engagement, a reaction, but its own research is showing that content that is hateful, that is divisive, that is polarizing, it’s easier to inspire people to anger than it is to other emotions,” she said. She added that the company recognizes that “if they change the algorithm to be safer, people will spend less time on the site, they’ll click on less ads, they’ll make less money.”

Facebook’s Pietsch said in her Sunday night statement that the platform depends on “being used in ways that bring people closer together” to attract advertisers, adding, “protecting our community is more important than maximizing our profits.”

In an internal memo obtained by the New York Times earlier Sunday, Clegg disputed claims that Facebook contributed to the January 6 riot.

“Social media has had a big impact on society in recent years, and Facebook is often a place where much of this debate plays out,” Clegg said in the memo. “So it’s natural for people to ask whether it is part of the problem. But the idea that Facebook is the chief cause of polarization isn’t supported by the facts.”

Haugen said that while “no one at Facebook is malevolent … the incentives are misaligned.”

“Facebook makes more money when you consume more content. People enjoy engaging with things that elicit an emotional reaction,” she said. “And the more anger that they get exposed to, the more they interact and the more they consume.”

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Proof that Instagram is not only failing to crack down on accounts promoting extreme dieting and eating disorders, but actively promotes those accounts, comes as Instagram and its parent company Facebook are facing intense scrutiny over the impact they have on young people’s mental health.

Instagram acknowledged to CNN this weekend that those accounts broke its rules against the promotion of extreme dieting, and that they shouldn’t have been allowed on the platform.

The extreme dieting accounts were promoted to an Instagram account set up by Sen. Richard Blumenthal’s staff. The Connecticut Senator’s team registered an account as a 13-year-old girl and proceeded to follow some dieting and pro-eating disorder accounts (the latter of which are supposed to be banned by Instagram). Soon, Instagram’s algorithm began almost exclusively recommending the young teenage account should follow more and more extreme dieting accounts, the Senator told CNN.

Blumenthal’s office shared with CNN a list of accounts Instagram’s algorithm had recommended. After CNN sent a sample from this list of five accounts to Instagram for comment, the company removed them, saying all of them broke its policies against encouraging eating disorders.

“We do not allow content that promotes or encourages eating disorders and we removed the accounts shared with us for breaking these rules,” a spokesperson for Facebook, Instagram’s parent company told CNN. “We use technology and reports from our community to find and remove this content as quickly as we can, and we’re always working to improve. We’ll continue to follow expert advice from academics and mental health organizations, like the National Eating Disorder Association, to strike the difficult balance between allowing people to share their mental health experiences while protecting them from potentially harmful content.”

Speaking to CNN Monday, Blumenthal said: “This experience shows very graphically how [Facebook’s] claims to protect children or take down accounts that may be dangerous to them are absolute hogwash.”

Blumenthal’s experiment is not an anomaly, and may come as little surprise to regular uses of Instagram who are familiar with how the platform’s algorithm recommends accounts that it has determined a user might be interested in.

It follows reporting by the Wall Street Journal based on internal Facebook documents that show the company is aware of the “toxic” effects its platforms, especially Instagram, can have on young people. Much of that reporting, and Facebook’s ensuing commentary, has centered on the negative impacts of social comparison to celebrities and popular figures on the app — a problem Facebook says is society-wide, and not exclusive to its apps. According to the WSJ reporting, however, Facebook researchers acknowledged that “social comparison is worse on Instagram” than some other platforms because it focuses on the entire body and a person’s lifestyle.

Blumenthal’s experiment goes a layer deeper, showing how quickly Instagram’s algorithm promotes harmful content to young users.

CNN set up an account last week using the same methodology as the Senator’s office, also following some extreme dieting and pro-eating disorder accounts. On Sunday, Instagram promoted accounts with names like “Sweet Skinny,” “Prettily Skinny,” and “Wanna Be Skinny” to the experiment CNN account that was also registered as belonging to a 13-year-old girl. CNN has reached out to Instagram to ask if these accounts also violate its policies.

The danger of eating disorder content on Instagram

Viewing content from these extreme dieting accounts — which included, for example, images of extremely thin bodies and information about a user’s “current weight” versus their “goal weight” — can act as validation for users already predisposed to unhealthy behaviors, experts say.

“It’s called confirmation bias, where people tend to seek information that confirms what they already believe is true,” said Pamela Keel, a psychology professor at Florida State University, who has studied how using Instagram can contribute to eating disorders. While confirmation bias is often discussed in the context of other issues on social media, such as vaccine misinformation, it could also affect “somebody who’s already thinking that they need to be thin, or thinner, and is looking for other people to agree with them that that’s an important thing,” she said.

“We’re constantly looking for validation that we’re right, even if that validation is really, really harmful to our personal health,” Keel added, raising the stakes for Instagram to avoid promoting such content.

The Wall Street Journal reported last month that researchers at Facebook who have studied its effects on young users over the past three years found that Instagram can damage young users’ mental health and body image, especially among teen girls. One internal document cited by the newspaper said that for teen girls who had recently experienced body image issues, the app exacerbated those feelings for one in three of them.

In a Senate hearing last week, Facebook’s global head of safety Antigone Davis criticized the Journal’s reporting, calling the Facebook documents it cited “not bombshell research.” She added that the company has found “that more teen girls actually find Instagram helpful.” Frances Haugen, the former Facebook employee who leaked the documents to the Journal and lawmakers, is set to testify to the same Senate committee on Tuesday.

Instagram has also pushed back on claims about its role in perpetuating harmful behaviors by saying that social comparison is a widespread issue and that potentially problematic images are also available elsewhere. Indeed, “pro-anorexia” online communities have been around for years, predating the rise of Instagram. However, Instagram’s broad reach among young women and girls means that such content posted to its platform can be especially dangerous, according to Keel.

“The dominance of Instagram among the age group that was already at greatest risk of eating disorders is one [issue],” Keel said. “You’ve got a vicious cycle: You’ve got a group who are at elevated risk of these problems demonstrating to this artificial intelligence that this is what grabs their attention, and then that artificial intelligence says, ‘Here let me give you more of this.’ … It’s just a perfect storm.”

Chelsea Kronengold, communications lead for the National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA), added that while Instagram and other social media sites may not cause eating disorders and other body image issues, “we know it’s definitely a strong risk factor in these situations.”

Following the Journal’s reporting last month, Instagram detailed several new features it plans to implement to address mental health concerns (some of which were developed in partnership with NEDA), including “nudges” that could encourage users to change up their viewing habits if they’ve recently looked at potentially problematic content. The company has said it wants to prevent potentially triggering content while still allowing users in recovery from eating disorders to discuss their experiences — a potentially difficult balance to strike, experts say.

“There’s no long-term benefit to killing members of your largest user base, because eating disorders are incredibly dangerous, there’s no way that’s what [Instagram] wants,” Keel said. “My one request would be just to be more transparent. You’re tracking this, you’re trying to do things to minimize the risk of your site, and just be more transparent about what you’re trying to do.”

If you or someone you know has an eating disorder, NEDA (in the US) has phone, text, and chat services available on its website and Beat (in the UK) has phone and chat services available on its website.

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Former President Donald Trump on Wednesday filed class-action lawsuits targeting Facebook and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter and its CEO Jack Dorsey, as well as YouTube and its parent company’s CEO Sundar Pichai, in a Hail Mary move after being removed from their platforms. Courts have typically dismissed similar suits, and these are likely doomed from the start as well.

The announcement about the lawsuits comes after the companies removed Trump’s access to their platforms in the aftermath of the January 6 riot on Capitol Hill. Twitter banned Trump altogether, and he is currently suspended from Facebook for at least two years. YouTube also suspended Trump in January, but it said in March that his account would be reinstated when the company is confident that the risk of violence has receded.

Twitter, Facebook and Google, which owns YouTube, declined to comment.

Tech companies have consistently rejected claims that their platforms discriminate based on partisan ideology. Independent studies have not corroborated such accusations, and several have found that partisan voices, particularly on the right, are among the most engaged-with on the platforms.

Trump’s suits continue a trend that began during his presidency: Throwing the book against companies he perceives to be a threat to his political brand. Last spring, while he was still in office, Trump signed an executive order aimed at “preventing online censorship” and seeking to expand legal liability for tech companies.

But the tech companies are legally permitted to run their platforms as they see fit, and courts have dismissed a string of similar lawsuits. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube all cited the potential for future incitement of violence or risks to public safety following the Capitol riot in announcing their decisions to remove Trump’s accounts.

Trump said during a press conference Wednesday that he is asking a court in Florida “to order an immediate halt to social media companies’ illegal, shameful censorship of the American people.”

“We’re going to hold big tech very accountable,” he said.

The push to bring legal action against tech platforms over bias allegations has spread nationwide. In May, Florida passed a law allowing politicians that have been suspended or removed from social media to sue those companies.

But the effort has run up against the realities of current law — and the Constitution. Last week, a federal judge blocked Florida’s law from going into effect, saying government attempts to force social media companies to host political speech violates the First Amendment. (Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has vowed to appeal.)

The judge’s ruling also said the Florida law ran counter to a federal law Trump had sought to weaken with his executive order: Section 230 of the Communications Act of 1934. Section 230 provides legal immunity to websites that moderate user-generated content, and has been used by tech platforms to nip many lawsuits in the bud.

In Congress, numerous bills have been proposed to narrow the scope of Section 230, including by some Democrats who believe tech companies are not doing enough to curb hate speech and harassment online.

But much of the momentum for changing Section 230 has come from Republicans upset about how social media companies have enforced their rules when conservatives have broken them. Trump, in his order, accused tech companies of “engaging in selective censorship that is harming our national discourse,” and pushed for the Federal Communications Commission to “clarify” Section 230.

Legal experts and FCC officials themselves questioned the agency’s authority to do that, citing the same First Amendment issues that tied up the Florida law. President Joe Biden later rescinded Trump’s order.

Now, having failed to turn the machinery of the US government against the tech industry, Trump is trying to get at it through the courts himself. But with Section 230 still on the books, it’s unclear how he could succeed.

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The Transportation Security Administration screened 616,469 people at airport security checkpoints across the United States on Christmas Day, the agency said Saturday.

That’s just 23 percent of the number of travelers who flew the same day a year ago, before the pandemic, and about half of the 1.2 million passengers who flew on Wednesday, setting a pandemic air travel record. On Thursday, Christmas Eve, 846,520 people passed through TSA checkpoints.

Smaller passenger numbers on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day mark a lull before numbers begin to tick up again, as people head home from holiday travels.

Sunday is expected to be another big day for air travel, travel experts say. TSA numbers show that in the last week, nearly 7 million people were screened at airport security checkpoints.

The holiday travel rush comes even after the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention urged Americans to stay home to avoid spreading coronavirus. The increase in air travel is stoking new fears among health experts of another jump in Covid-19 infections, similar to a spike recorded following the previous pandemic air travel record set around Thanksgiving.

“We need to try to bend the curve, stop this exponential increase and so we’re really asking the American public to prevent these infections and avoid travel and wash their hands, wear a mask and maintain distance,” Dr. Henry Walke, the CDC’s Covid-19 incident manager, said earlier this month.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told CBS earlier this month that he would not spend the Christmas holiday with his daughters for the first time in more than 30 years.

The uptick in travel also comes as executives from several airlines look to bring back thousands of workers who were furloughed in the fall because of depressed travel numbers.

Congress’ latest Covid-19 relief bill includes an extension of the airline industry’s Payroll Support Program, which sets aside $15 billion in assistance to rehire more than 32,000 United and American Airlines employees furloughed in September. The companies say the additional funds are enough to pay those workers through March 31.

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