The Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen
Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee, secretly copied tens of thousands of pages of the company’s internal documents before leaving her job in 2021. Frances Haugen later revealed her identity in an interview with CBS’ 60 Minutes, setting off a major debate over Facebook’s responsibility for the harm linked to its platforms. As per a TIME report published in October 2021, Haugen was a data scientist who worked as a product manager on Facebook’s Civic Integrity team. Frances Haugen joined Facebook in June 2019, hoping to help the company tackle misinformation.
She said the company repeatedly put its business interests ahead of public safety. Haugen told 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley that Facebook was “substantially worse” than other platforms she had seen when it came to putting user engagement ahead of product safety. Haugen said the findings showed that the platform could worsen body-image concerns among some young users. Lena Pietsch, the company’s director of policy communications, said its teams had to balance users’ right to express themselves with the need to keep the platform safe.
The material exposed concerns about how the social media giant handled misinformation, hate speech and the impact of Instagram on teenage girls. She had become concerned about online conspiracy theories after losing a friend to them. Before joining Facebook, she had worked at other technology companies, including Google and Pinterest. Facebook’s internal research also examined Instagram’s effects on teenage girls. The documents also raised concerns about Facebook’s ability to moderate harmful content in languages beyond English and French. Haugen argued that the company did not invest enough in safety systems for all the regions where it operated. Facebook rejected Haugen’s claim that it encouraged harmful content and failed to act.