Frances Haugen left the Facebook parent company Meta in May 2021. What’s more, a little later she published thousands of internal documents – and thus gave up her career. Today she speaks openly about what makes social networks, including Twitter and Tiktok, so dangerous.
Frances Haugen made it: After college, she went straight to Google, while doing her master’s degree at Harvard. She then worked at Yelp and Pinterest, eventually ending up on Facebook. Then she threw everything overboard. Because at Facebook she wanted to fight disinformation and influence honestly and sincerely, which is why she worked in the department “Civic Misinformation” (“Civic Misinformation”). But over time, she realized that her daily actions no longer had much to do with the original mission – frustration set in.
When Facebook then disbanded her team in time for the 2020 US election, she decided to act. Until she was fired in May 2021, she stole internal material, including studies that many experts believe should prove that Facebook knew exactly what the algorithm was doing to users. Nevertheless, Facebook did not intervene, probably, experts say, out of concern for profit. With these documents she went public. In her new book, The Truth About Facebook, she describes the journey from rural Iowa to mighty Silicon Valley.
Frances, how are you? How has sharing all this information affected your life?