How a Facebook employee got separated from the giant social network

Less than two years after Facebook hired Frances Haugen to help correct dangerous distortions spreading across its platform, she had seen enough.

The idealism that she and countless others had invested in the promises of the world’s largest social network to repair itself had been terribly misplaced. The harm Facebook and its brother Instagram were doing to users was matched only by the company’s resistance to change, she concluded. And the world beyond Facebook needed to know.

When the 37-year-old data scientist appeared before Congress and the cameras last week to accuse Facebook of seeking profit over security, it was possibly the most important choice of her life.

And for a still young industry that has become one of the most powerful forces in society, it has highlighted a growing threat: The era of the Big Tech whistleblower is definitely here.

“There has been a general awakening among workers in tech companies asking, ‘What am I doing here? “Said Jonas Kron of Trillium Investment Management, who has pushed Google to strengthen protection for employees who sound the alarm on the company’s wrongdoing.

“When you have hundreds of thousands of people asking this question, it is inevitable that you will have more denunciations,” he said.

Now speak

Haugen is by far the most visible of these whistleblowers. And his 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.

But she is only the latest to join a growing list of workers across tech determined to speak out. Almost all of them are women, and observers say this is no coincidence.

Even after making inroads, women and especially women of color remain underdogs in the heavily masculine tech sector, said Ellen Pao, an executive who sued Silicon Valley investment firm Kleiner Perkins in 2012 for discrimination based on sex.

This status positions them to be more critical and to see “some of the systemic issues in a way that the people who are part of and benefit from the most and who are rooted in the system may not be able to deal with,” she said. said.

Price to pay

In recent years, workers at companies such as Google, Pinterest, Uber and Theranos, as well as others at Facebook, have sounded the alarm bells about what they call blatant abuse of power of the part of those in control.

Their new outspokenness is shaking up an industry that touts its power to improve society, while earning billions. Workers, many of whom are well educated and well paid, have long embraced this ethic. But for a growing number, confidence in the company’s line is fading.

Yet there is a difference between talking about your business failures and revealing them to the world. There is a price to pay, and Haugen certainly knew it.

“It’s absolutely terrifying, terrifying to come to the point of doing what she did. And you know that by the time you start your testimony, your life is going to change,” said Wendell Potter, a former executive. of health insurance which denounced the practices of its own industry.

Since appearing before Congress on Tuesday, Haugen has moved away from public view. A representative said she and her lawyer were unavailable for comment.

Local prodigy

Born in Iowa, the daughter of a doctor and academic turned pastor, Haugen arrives in the limelight with sparkling credentials, including a Harvard commerce degree and multiple patents.

Long before she became a whistleblower, Haugen was something of a local prodigy.

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 nation’s top 10. Years later, when the local newspaper wrote about Haugen’s landing at Google, one of her elementary school teachers recalled her as “horribly brilliant”, although she was not at all embarrassed about it. ‘herself.

In the fall of 2002, she moved to the brand new Olin College of Engineering outside of Boston to join her first class of 75.

Many had turned down offers from top universities, attracted by Olin’s offer of free education to early adopters, and the chance to be a part of creating something new, said Lynn Andrea Stein, professor of computer science. .

But the school couldn’t get accreditation until it started producing graduates, making it a non-entity in the eyes of some employers and a barrier for Haugen and others like her.

“The folks at Google actually rejected his request without reading it,” Stein said.

Stein helped persuade the company to change their mind, sending an email describing Haugen as “a voracious learner and an absolutely capable person” with a work ethic and formidable communication and leadership skills.

At Google, Haugen worked on a project to make thousands of books accessible on mobile phones, and another to help build a nascent social network.

Google paid for Haugen to get a graduate degree in business at Harvard, where a classmate said he already had in-depth discussions about the societal effects of new technologies.

“Smartphones were becoming a thing. We’ve talked a lot about the ethical use of data and the bad design of things, “said Jonathan Sheffi, a 2011 Haugen graduate.” She has always been very interested in the intersection of people’s well-being and technology.

Sheffi said he laughed when he saw social media posts in recent days questioning Haugen’s motives for the whistleblower.

“No one is forcing Frances anything,” he said.

At Harvard, Haugen worked with another student to create an online dating platform to bring together like-minded friends, a model the partner then turned into a Hinge dating app.

Haugen returned to Google, before moving on to jobs at Yelp and Pinterest, working every stop with algorithms designed to understand users’ desires and connect them with people and content that match their interests.

At the end of 2018, she was contacted by a Facebook recruiter. In recent interviews on “60 Minutes” and with the Wall Street Journal, Haugen recalls telling the company that she might be interested in a job if it was to help the platform fight democracy. and disinformation. She said she spoke to managers about a friend who was drawn to white nationalism after spending time in online forums, and her desire to prevent this from happening to others.

In June 2019, she joined a Facebook team that focused on network activity surrounding international elections. But she said she became frustrated as she became aware of the widespread misinformation online that fueled violence and abuse and which Facebook would not adequately address.

She resigned in May, but only after working for weeks to sift through the company’s internal research and copy thousands of documents. Yet, she told congressional investigators, she’s not here to destroy Facebook, just change it.

“I believe in the potential of Facebook,” she said during her testimony last week. “We can have social media that we love, that connects us, without tearing our democracy apart, putting our children at risk and sowing ethnic violence around the world. We can do better.

Maybe, but those who know the industry say Facebook and other tech giants are going to dig.

“There will be an internal repression. There used to be, ”said Ifeoma Ozoma, whistleblower at Pinterest, now trying to encourage other tech players to speak out against malpractice. “In this way, there is a deterrent effect through the increased surveillance to which employees will be subjected. “

Be a “point”

Within the larger community of whistleblowers, many support Haugen, praising what they see as his courage, calm intelligence, and foresight to take the documents that strengthen his case.

“What she did well was she got all of her documents in a row and she did it right from the start. … That will be his power, ”said Eileen Foster, a former Countrywide Financial executive who struggled to find another banking job after exposing widespread fraud in the company’s approval of subprime loans in 2008. .

Sophie Zhang, a former Facebook employee who accused the social network last year of ignoring fake accounts used to undermine the foreign election, said she was surprised the company didn’t catch Haugen during the his research on the company. The fierce denials of its leaders now betray their reluctance to change.

“I think they have fallen into a trap where they continue to deny and hide and become more and more inflammatory,” she said. “And that’s pushing more people to come forward.”

Still, Haugen’s actions may well prevent him from landing another job in the industry, Foster said. And if Facebook sues her legally for taking documents, it will have combat resources that a lone employee can never hope to match.

Foster remembers how her Countrywide boss, an ally, begged her to give it up.

“He said ‘Eileen, what are you doing? You are just a grain. A point !’ And I said, ‘Yeah, but I’m a pissed off point,’ ”Foster said.

Years later, after enduring the nastiness of her coworkers, rejection from employers and a long legal battle for her claims, she knows better. But she doesn’t regret her choices. And she feels a similar conviction in Haugen, although their denunciation is separated by a generation.

“I wish Frances the best,” she said.