When the Wall Street Journal launched a series of explosive articles based on internal Facebook documents in September, people naturally wondered about the source. Apparently, an unnamed employee had left the company, taking with her hundreds of documents that exposed how much Facebook (which changed its name to Meta several weeks later) understood the harm it was doing and how insufficient its remedies were. In October, 60 Minutes provided the answer: The whistleblower was a 37-year-old former product manager named Frances Haugen.
I almost did a spit take when I saw her face on the screen. Though I hadn’t spoken to Haugen for some time, I had gotten to know her fairly well on a 16-day trip around the world in 2007, led by Google vice president Marissa Mayer. Haugen had been one of 18 Google associate product managers on the trip, and as an embedded journalist I had interviewed and hung out with all of them.
The Frances Haugen that I saw on television that night—and the one who later testified to Congress, to the British Parliament, and the EU—was in many ways unchanged from the 22-year-old Googler in my traveling party: impeccably organized, a bit nerdy, and viscerally repelled by unfairness. But I wanted to get more of a sense of what led her to what many consider an act of courage and Facebook/Meta considers an act of perfidy. To WIRED, Meta denies Haugen’s claim that the company sacrifices safety for profit: “As a company, we have every commercial and moral incentive to try to give the maximum number of people as much of a positive experience as possible on Facebook,” says spokesperson Drew Pusateri, who also disputes Haugen’s claim that the company fails to adequately moderate content outside the US. It’s a tough argument for Meta to make because the documents Haugen presented say otherwise.
What happened to make Frances Haugen simultaneously a hero to both parties in Congress and Mark Zuckerberg’s most dangerous critic?
Last week I sat down virtually with her—she was at a Berkeley hotel, on her first trip to the Bay Area since she left Facebook—to discuss her personal journey, the Company Formerly Known as Facebook, and her future. The interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Steven Levy: When I first saw your face in the promo for 60 Minutes I thought back to that 2007 trip. If I were to guess which one of those 18 associate product managers would become a whistleblower, it would have been you. You struck me as a little different— everyone else was locked into a standard Silicon Valley career path. But you were talking about going to graduate school. You also had a sixth sense for injustice. Does that sound right to you?
Frances Haugen: I probably had a broader education than a lot of the other APMs. They had relatively consistent CVs—they went to Stanford and had CS degrees. I went to Olin, which was a brand-new engineering school; I was part of the first graduating class there. I took a bunch of humanities classes. I had done high school debate, and I coached in college. One of the goals of a liberal arts education is to establish who you are as a person. And one of the unfortunate things about how engineering is often taught now is that they fill people’s schedules so full with requirements that you lose some of that self-definition period that college is traditionally about. I feel very grateful that I had that experience because it gives you a chance to kind of establish how you make decisions, and what is important to you. You can be externally defined, or you can be internally defined. Still, I wouldn’t say that I was a super outsider. I loved Google. But I did probably have a little bit more context.
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