Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee, on Tuesday (5 October) took a stand against her former employer at a hearing on Capitol Hill. She said that Facebook's products "harm children, stoke division and weaken our democracy".

Haugen on Sunday (3 October) told CBS that she had also shared a number of documents to the Wall Street Journal. From the same documents, the Wall Street Journal revealed that according to a research carried by Facebook, Instagram could harm girls’ mental health.

At the hearing, Haugen said that Facebook already knew the necessary changes to make its applications safer, but would not make it for the sake of optimum profit. She also mentioned how Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of the social media giant, has too much control that nobody is holding him accountable but himself.

Zuckerberg denied these allegations, saying that they “don’t make any sense”. He also pointed out the company’s efforts in fighting harmful content, establishing transparency, as well as creating what it considers to be the most advanced research regarding these issues.

He added that the Instagram research has been mischaracterised and many young people have a positive experience on the photo-sharing application. He also noted how important it is for him that everything that the company builds should be safe and good for kids.

Both Republican and Democratic senators appeared to unite over this matter. Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal even compared the revelation about the whole Facebook debacle to the downfall of the tobacco industry, which hid its harmful effects over the years of its existence, in the US. 

In a statement issued after the hearing, Facebook expressed its disagreement with Haugen’s statement, but it agreed that "it's time to begin to create standard rules for the Internet".

Facebook has been under close scrutiny for its failure to protect users’ privacy as well as not doing enough to handle the spread of fake news. The company on Monday (4 October) experienced a massive outage due to configuration changes.