We begin today’s roundup with The Washington Post editorial board and the urgent need to hold Facebook accountability in light of recent whistleblower revelations:

Frances Haugen, formerly a product manager in the firm’s civic integrity division, disclosed her identity this weekend on CBS’s “60 Minutes.” When she testifies before the Senate Commerce Committee on Tuesday, her remarks are expected to home in on Instagram’s effects on teen girls. Yet the documents she has shared cover the panoply of her erstwhile employer’s struggles to contain the natural impulse of any platform in the attention economy: to optimize for whatever keeps people scrolling and clicking, regardless of the consequences. The fact that these papers exist shows that Facebook isn’t ignoring its problems; the fact that they’ve only made their way into the open through secrecy and subversion, however, is a big problem in itself.

The whistleblower’s main contention is that Facebook knows the harm its products cause, yet has hidden that harm from outsiders as it continues to prioritize profits. Certainly, some data points are troubling: When an algorithmic shift intended to increase “meaningful social interaction” actually escalated the rage expressed on the site, for example, major political parties in Europe warned that the change had pushed them toward more extreme policy positions. Facebook’s vice president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, argued Sunday on CNN that Facebook is not the chief cause of polarization, but that’s hardly the point. The point is whether Facebook can worsen the divisiveness that afflicts society today and what responsibility it has to try to do the opposite.

From Reuters:

“When we realized tobacco companies were hiding the harms it caused, the government took action. When we figured out cars were safer with seatbelts, the government took action,” said Haugen’s written testimony to be delivered to a Senate Commerce subcommittee. “I implore you to do the same here.”

Haugen will tell the panel that Facebook executives regularly chose profits over user safety.

Eugene Robinson’s analysis at The Washington Post:

Switching topics to the continued, unreasonable obstruction by Arizona Senator Krysten Sinema, Michelle Goldberg at The New York Times stresses the difference between being a maverick and being a narcissist:

Sinema, by contrast, breaks with her fellow Democrats much more often. There hasn’t been a year since she entered Congress, Enten wrote, when she’s voted with her party more than 75 percent of the time. But what really makes her different from McCain is that nobody seems to know what she stands for.

Eric Levitz:

On a final note, don’t miss John Nichols at The Nation and his insight into the progressive strategy to hold the line on the President’s Build Back Better agenda: