Menlo Park, California-based social media company Facebook puts ‘astronomical profits before people’ harms young users and is causing instability in democracies, a whistleblower has asserted in evidence to the United States Congress.

On Tuesday, Mark Zuckerburg, an American media magnate and CEO of Facebook, strike back at claims the social media giant fuels division, harms children, and needs to be regulated, saying the claim the firm puts profits over safety is ‘just not true.’

During a US Senate Commerce Subcommittee hearing, Haugen called for transparency regarding how social media company allures users to extend their stay on the platform, giving them abundant opportunity to advertise to them. She said that as long as Facebook is “operating in shadows,” secreting its analysis from public eye, it’s unaccountable.

Moreover, Haugen said that the social media firm’s leadership realizes to make Instagram and Facebook safer, but wouldn’t modify because they’ve put their “astronomical profits” over people.

A former Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, 37, who worked as a product manager on the civic integrity team at the American social networking service company, was questioned on Sunday by CBS. Haugen spent fifteen years serving for some of the major social media firms worldwide, including Pinterest, Google, and until May, Facebook Inc. She said that the documents she disclosed proved “Facebook frequently prioritized growth & safety.”

Facebook Incentivizes Polarizing, Divisive Content – Frances Haugen

Haugen said that social media giant knew it steered children towards harmful content and that its “application was like cigarettes” for below eighteen. In an extended testimony, the ex-Facebook employee stated the firm didn’t have sufficient staff to maintain the platform safe and was exactly intensifying ethnic conflict in the third world.

Moreover, on Tuesday, Haugen appeared in Washington D.C. after coming forward as the source of revelations in the Wall Start Journal in September based in internal Facebook papers. They disclosed the firm knew Instagram, a US photo & video sharing social media service, was damaging children’s mental health and that modifications to the News Feed Feature of Facebook has made the platform more angry, divisive, and polarizing.

The social media giant Facebook is one of the largest internet communities worldwide. It had over 2.8 Bn worldwide users that makeup approximately sixty percent of internet users on earth. Yet, in spite of its extensive reach, Frances Haugen told “60 Minutes” on CBS News the firm doesn’t offer similar safety measures for each language on the forum or nation where the Facebook platform is used.

Read Also: Facebook Says Outage Root Cause Was “Faulty Configuration Change”