Good morning from the Financial Times. Today is Wednesday, October 6th.

And this is your FT News briefing.

Today we're going to take you to the Congo Basin Rainforest,

our Africa editor, David Pillingwood, there to find out about a radical plan to create value

from preserving the rainforest. The problem at the moment is that the forest is really valued at

zero. And when you value something at zero, the incentive is to chop it down and turn it into

something that is worth something. Plus private equity groups are snapping up publicly-owned

companies for more than a pretty penny. But first, a former Facebook employee was on Capitol

Hill yesterday to give U.S. lawmakers a damning inside look at the social media company.

I'm here today because I believe Facebook's products harm children, stoke division,

and weaken our democracy. I'm Mark Filipino and here's the news you need to start your day.

Facebook whistleblower Francis Hogan was in Washington yesterday and she told the U.S.

Senators that the social media company repeatedly chose to maximize online engagement

instead of minimizing harm to users. The FT's Kieran Stacey said Hogan had powerful specifics

to back up her point. She described how a bunch of Facebook employees had come to Mark Zuckerberg

to suggest that the company might want to tone down some of its algorithms so that in her words,

the platform became less twitchy. It became less likely to promote content heavily because people

were interacting with it. And they said, look, we don't have to do this everywhere. We just want to do

it in certain countries where there's a real risk of violence. I think she was mentioning at the time,

Myanmar. And she used that as an example of a broader theme, which is that whenever Mark Zuckerberg

and Facebook in general were given the choice, do you want to tone down the virality of what

happens on your platforms? Or do you want to keep everything tuned up to the max and thereby

...