Unfriended: The woman who worked for Facebook for two years before becoming a whistleblower about the company’s business practices testified before Congress yesterday that, “I’m here today because I believe Facebook’s products, harm children, stoke division, and weaken our democracy.”

  Fraunces Haugen, 37, who worked as a product manager for the company’s civic misinformation team, leaked a trove of internal documents demonstrating the social media company’s damaging influences.

  She said, “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.” And she went on to say about Monday’s Facebook outage, “For more than five hours, Facebook wasn’t used to deepen divides, destabilize democracies, and make young girls and women feel bad about their bodies.” 

  Facebook and other online platforms have been pipelines for false information about the 2020 election, the coronavirus, vaccines, and voodoo cures, like the livestock deworming drug Ivermectin. “I do not believe Facebook, as currently structured, has the capability to stop vaccine misinformation,” Haugen said.

  She said the man responsible is Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg. “The buck stops with Mark,” Haugen said, “There is no one currently holding Mark accountable but himself.”

  Zuckerberg responded with statement saying, he cares “deeply about issues like safety, well-being and mental health.”

Deflation: President Biden and Democratic leaders are facing political reality and whittling down his $3.5 trillion expansion of the social safety net. The figure is down to $2.3 trillion or less.

  On the cutting room floor are free community college, child tax credits, and universal prekindergarten. Now those benefits would be available only for  lower- and middle-income Americans.

  But even as he trims back, Biden still has an aggressive and expensive agenda. 

  “These bills are about competitiveness versus complacency,” Biden said yesterday at a union hall in Michigan. “They’re about opportunity versus decay.”

Out of the Picture: Lars Vilks, the cartoonist and free speech activist whose 2007 drawing of the Prophet Muhammad on the body of a dog resulted in a number of attempts to kill him, has died in a car crash in Sweden. 

  Vilks, who had been under police protection since 2010, was headed toward his home in southern Sweden when the civilian police vehicle he was traveling in veered across the median and collided head-on with a truck, killing  the 75-year-old Vilks and his two bodyguards. 

The Spin Rack: A federal jury in San Francisco has ordered the Tesla electric car company to pay a former elevator operator $137 million for his claims that he was subjected to racial discrimination on the job. Owen Diaz, who worked as a contract elevator operator at the company’s Fremont, California offices from 2015 to 2016 had claimed that he and other black employees  were called the N-word and that he was told to “go back to Africa.” — Rising ocean temperatures killed about 14% of the world’s coral reefs in just under 10 years, according to a new analysis from the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network. The encouraging word was that many of the reefs are resilient and recover if immediate action is taken to fight future climate warming. — Former president Donald Trump was left off the Forbes 400 list of America’s richest people for the first time in 25 years, the magazine reported. — The FBI raided the offices of the head of the New York City police union in what appears to be a corruption investigation.

— Nine wooden barracks housed hundreds of prisoners the Auschwitz death camp were marked with antisemitic phrases and Holocaust-denying slogans, the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum said.

That’s a Drag: As beaches remain closed and cleanup continues after an oil spill off the coast of Southern California, authorities say the case of the disaster may have been a ship’s anchor that caught and dragged an underwater pipeline. Federal investigators also found that the pipeline owner didn’t quickly shut down.

Covid Toe: Doctors have noted that some people who catch Covid-19 develop red lesions on their toes in a syndrome that’s been given the obvious name, “Covid toe.” Researchers say there may be two causes, the first being the body’s antiviral protein called type 1 interferon. And they say the other is a type of antibody that mistakenly attacks the patient’s own cells and tissues, not just the invading virus.

  Just what you need on top of everything else.

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