Courtesy of Frances Haugen The Best Way to Fix Facebook

Facebook’s commercial success is based on algorithms that bump the most titled content to the top of users’ newsfeeds. These threads help to connect users, but also contribute to the promotion of conspiracy theories and eating disorders among teen users of Instagram. Haugen said that years from now, women will effectively suffer from brittle bones and infertility due to the likes of Facebook. As a witness, she exudes credibility, refusing to engage in personal attacks on Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg or thorny issues around free speech, while admitting he had no answers. His language was clear. What was even more devastating for Facebook was how a sober-headed testimony began to sound like a call to intervention. Facebook was hiding its problems, Haugen said, “and like people often do when they can hide their problems, they get in over their heads.” Congress needs to step in and say, “We can figure out how to fix these things together.”

Past Facebook scandals have pulled lawmakers in different directions—for example, the feud with Zuckerberg, who is being censored—and has resulted in inaction. But their joint support is now a turning point. So, here are four things Congress can do:

One, order Facebook to halt or significantly reduce engagement-based ranking algorithms. Eliminate nicotine making people addicted to Facebook and Instagram. Haugen’s alternative is “chronological ranking with little spam demotion.” That means going back to the early days of Facebook, where newsfeeds were simply ordered by time. Algorithms can still remove spam, though what it involves is up for debate, but time and people—rather than machines—will be the curators of what people see. This would have a huge impact on Facebook’s profits, and Zuckerberg would have opposed such a move because of his fiduciary obligation to shareholders. So Congress needs to act.

Second, order Facebook to spend more on content moderation. Haugen said Facebook shouldn’t be broken. This would starve security teams in an empire of resources and their ability to work together. This will cut the problem down into more smaller problems. Instead, she suggests “human-layered social media.” Facebook’s artificial intelligence often falls short against harmful content, with humans already doing a lot of work to find and stop it. But Facebook keeps that work at arm’s length, outsourcing it to third-party vendors. One improvement supported by a recent study by New York University’s Stern School of Business was to double the number of Facebook’s content moderators to 30,000 and make many of them full-time staff members.

Third, establishing an agency to audit Facebook’s algorithms and features. Haugen called for a federal regulatory agency to analyze Facebook’s internal “experiments” with the software and share that information with its oversight board. The board already has a system in place for advising Facebook but has complained that the company is not coming forward with the necessary data to make a decision. Raw internal research—as uncovered in Haugen’s document dump—could give more weight to its directives (or orders from a new agency) to make Facebook’s sites healthier. For example, it could order Facebook to increase official news sources, as it did after the November election; Add a feature that requires users to click a link before sharing something; Or prompt from time to time for the most addicted users.

And four, regular disclosure is mandatory for researchers. Facebook should be required to release data on what is happening on its site (with the right privacy protections), such as which posts are shared the most or which political ads are being clicked on. Only then can academics from outside the company analyze its systems and report on their findings.

None of these ideas are particularly new. Similar suggestions so far by various civil rights and privacy advocates have been met with the silence and inaction of politicians. But his work has laid an important cornerstone for Haugen’s testimony to eventually gain momentum. US lawmakers would like to know what they think of his views, and hopefully hear some consensus when they reach out to such groups for feedback.