<https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/oct/04/how-friend-lost-to-misinformation-drove-facebook-whistleblower-frances-haugen>
Frances Haugen, the whistleblower behind a series of damaging
revelations
<https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/oct/03/former-facebook-employee-frances-haugen-identifies-herself-as-whistleblower>
about Facebook, is adamant that she wants to help the social media
company and not foment hatred of it.
The 37-year-old leaked tens of thousands of internal company documents
<https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/oct/04/facebook-tearing-our-societies-apart-key-excerpts-from-a-whistleblower-frances-haugen>
after becoming frustrated that Facebook was not publicly acknowledging
the harm its platforms could cause.
“If people just hate Facebook
<https://www.theguardian.com/technology/facebook> more because of what
I’ve done, then I’ve failed. I believe in truth and reconciliation – we
need to admit reality. The first step of that is documentation,” she
told the Wall Street Journal, which revealed the documents in its
Facebook Files series.
In her final message on Facebook’s internal system, posted when she left
in May, she wrote: “I don’t hate Facebook. I love Facebook. I want to
save it.”
Haugen, born and raised in Iowa by a doctor father and a mother who gave
up an academic career to become an episcopalian priest, said it was a
lost friendship that changed her view of social media.
Haugen was a successful tech professional with a CV that included stints
at Pinterest and Google but a decade ago she was diagnosed with celiac
disease, an autoimmune condition, and in 2014 entered an intensive care
unit with a blood clot in her thigh. A family friend was hired to help
her with daily tasks such as shopping but their relationship
deteriorated as he became obsessed with online forums touting conspiracy
theories about dark forces manipulating politics.
“It was a really important friendship, and then I lost him,” she told
the WSJ. The former friend has since abandoned his conspiratorial
beliefs, which had dragged him into a world of the occult and white
nationalism. But it changed Haugen’s career.
“It’s one thing to study misinformation, it’s another to lose someone to
it,” she said. “A lot of people who work on these products only see the
positive side of things.”
So when a Facebook recruiter approached Haugen in 2018, she said she
wanted a job that related to democracy and the spread of false
information. That led to a role in 2019 as a product manager in
Facebook’s civic integrity team, which looks at election interference
around the world.
The group was disbanded after the 2020 US presidential poll and Haugen
contacted the WSJ soon after, her dismay deepening after the 6 January
riot in Washington
<https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/us-capitol-breach>. Facebook has
said it “invested heavily” in people and technology to make its platform
safe, but Haugen believed the company was not doing enough to combat
misinformation.
“Facebook acted like it was powerless to staff these teams,” she said.
Reacting to Haugen’s comment, Facebook said: “Hosting hateful or harmful
content is bad for our community, bad for advertisers, and ultimately,
bad for our business.” On Tuesday, Haugen will appear in front of US
lawmakers to reiterate her argument that Facebook did not do enough to
stop the hate and harm.
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