Listening to Frances Haugen presenting to the MP's doesn't sound like a credible witness, it's just a fairly vitriolic rant blaming the 'anonymous' algorithms,
telling MP's what they wanted to hear - I'd like to hear to what extent this is generally an AI application with a target goal of maximising profit, or, genuinely under human control
Is it akin to the already reproached AI type algorithms showing 'unconcious' colour bias used by (was it) google for employment/cv triage ?
A lot of what I heard (admittedly little) did make sense as a lot of the time the people doing the programming do so based on their own experiences or without quite realising how it's going to work in the real world - things like algorithms that are designed to maximise the views are generally going to do so by promoting either the most controversial or popular ones and those like them and if you're aiming them at people that have liked/seen similar content you get a feed back loop where it sees it's succeeding by the original design goals but not in the way that was intended.
She also made a very good point that tools designed to help spot problematic content won't even work in the same basic language unless you allow for differences in how it's used, American English is different enough to UK English that it causes confusion even amongst humans who speak one or other versions, unless you have people who speak all 3 main English variants (UK, US and Aus) any "English" tool is likely to be useless for a good portion of the uses who speak the language. This is especially true if you don't have enough support from native english speakers for that version, although UK english speakers seem to have slightly fewer issues than US ones, mainly because in the UK we get so exposed to US use of language*.
You can see this in things like captchas where invariably they'll use American images and wording - AFAIK we don't have "fire hydrants" in the UK certainly in the NY style of nice red ones above ground, but that's what you see as one common example (and Americans probably wouldn't have a clue about pelican or zebra crossings as they seem to just call them crosswalks).
To get such tools to work properly requires "localisation" (something routinely done in books published in the US/UK by the respective publishers), which in turn requires a more diverse group than is often found.
Software and design has a very very long history of mistakes being baked in because programmers or designers didn't think to go outside their circle of friends or experiences, it's why things like facial recognition software can be laughably bad (the image sets used are typically very much based on the likes of American models/historical photos, so the further away you get from that the worse it gets**), or things like sensors that are meant to kick in when someone puts their hand under a tap/dryer that don't work because they were never calibrated with anything other than a "pale" skin tone in mind.
Even things as common as your average car is often partly designed around data sets often from the 50's and 60's that made assumptions about who would be driving and anatomy that are now known to be incorrect, things as simple as not allowing for the height difference that is typical between men and women, or that people tend to be bigger today (height and weight) than in the 60's. IIRC they only started to commonly make crash test dummies that actually accounted for differences in anatomy between men and women a decade or two back (before that they just used different sizes).
Even the availability of shoes is often based on information that is now incorrect because the data used to select which sizes to make (and how many) is out of date (I say this as a 12w/13 shoe wearer who is utterly fed up of trying to find shoes that fit*** and have been since I hit size 11 in my teens
)
IIRC even the basics of photography has issues because at least one standard was set for a very specific use back in something like 1930, which means you have to allow for that in any software that you want to use widely.
*I've had to explain a few times to Americans on an old UO forum why we (Brits and Aussies) were finding some of their phrasing confusing/funny, they'd not considered that something they'd heard out of context by a Brit was actually quite rude/could mean something very different depending on the exact context or that the US names for things were different to those used elsewhere and could be seen as slightly rude/have very different meanings.
**IIRC there are now companies who specialise in nothing but trying to get good phots from multiple angles of subjects from a host of backgrounds and countries rather than basically jobbing actors in LA, or the people that tended to get good photos taken back when they were expensive (and many of the newspaper archives used will skew strongly towards what celebs looked like).
***I basically can't buy them retail as many stores seem to stop stocking at about a 10 or 11 in most styles (or so my experience shows), even if the manufacturer makes them larger.
[edit]
sorry long carry on sentences.
I explained what that is in the part of my post which you didn't quote? It's some sort of display code. I'd guess it's used for displaying a like/share button on posts (which this forum doesn't have enabled) or for embedding content from facebook into a post.
