Less than two years after Facebook hired Frances Haugen to help correct dangerous distortions spilling across its platform, she had seen enough. The harm FB and Instagram were doing to users was rivaled only by the company’s resistance to change, she says
Former Facebook employee Frances Haugen speaks during a hearing of the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety, and Data Security, on Capitol Hill, Tuesday, Oct. 5, 2021, in Washington. Less than two years after Facebook hired Frances Haugen to help correct dangerous distortions spilling across its platform, she had seen enough.
Haugen is by far the most visible of those whistleblowers. And her accusations that Facebook’s platforms harm children and incite political violence -- backed up by thousands of pages of the company’s own research -- may well be the most damning. Their new outspokenness is ruffling an industry that touts its power to improve society, while earning billions. Workers, many well educated and highly paid, have long embraced that ethic. But for a growing number, faith in the company line is fading.
The Iowa-born daughter of a doctor and an academic turned pastor, Haugen arrives in the spotlight with sparkling credentials, including a Harvard business degree and multiple patents.Raised near the University of Iowa campus, where her father taught medicine, Haugen was a member of a high school engineering team ranked in the country’s top 10.
At Google, Haugen worked on a project to make thousands of books accessible on mobile phones, and another to help create a fledgling social network. Haugen returned to Google, before moving on to jobs at Yelp and Pinterest, at each stop working with the algorithms engineered to understand the desires of users and put them together with people and content that fit their interests.
“I believe in the potential of Facebook,” she said during her testimony last week. “We can have social media we enjoy, that connects us, without tearing apart our democracy, putting our children in danger, and sowing ethnic violence around the world. We can do better.”“There’s going to be a clamp down internally. There already has been,” said Ifeoma Ozoma, a whistleblower at Pinterest now trying to encourage others in tech to expose corporate misconduct.
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