Blowing the whistle against a multibillion-dollar tech company is no small feat
Frances Haugen is in the back of a Paris taxi, waving a piece of sushi in the air.
The cab is on the way to a Hilton hotel, where this November afternoon she is due to meet with the French digital economy minister. The Eiffel Tower appears briefly through the window, piercing a late-fall haze. Haugen is wolfing down lunch on the go, while recalling an episode from her childhood. The teacher of her gifted and talented class used to play a game where she would read to the other children the first letter of a word from the dictionary and its definition. Haugen and her classmates would compete, in teams, to guess the word. "At some point, my classmates convinced the teacher that it was unfair to put me on either team, because whichever team had me was going to win and so I should have to compete against the whole class," she says.
Did she win? "I did win," she says with a level of satisfaction that quickly fades to indignation. "And so imagine! That makes kids hate you!" She pops an edamame into her mouth with a flourish. "I look back and I'm like, That was a bad idea."
She tells the story not to draw attention to her precociousness—although it does do that—but to share the lesson it taught her. "This shows you how badly some educators understand psychology," she says. While some have described the Facebook whistle-blower as an activist, Haugen says she sees herself as an educator. To her mind, an important part of her mission is driving home a message in a way that resonates with people, a skill she has spent years honing.
It is the penultimate day of a grueling three-week tour of Europe, during which Haugen has cast herself in the role of educator in front of the U.K. and E.U. Parliaments, regulators and one tech conference crowd. Haugen says she wanted to cross the Atlantic to offer her advice to lawmakers putting the final touches on new regulations that take aim at the outsize influence of large social media companies.
The new U.K. and E.U. laws have the potential to force Facebook and its competitors to open up their algorithms to public scrutiny, and face large fines if they fail to address problematic impacts of their platforms. European lawmakers and regulators "have been on this journey a little longer" than their U.S. counterparts, Haugen says diplomatically. "My goal was to support lawmakers as they think through these issues."
Beginning in late summer, Haugen, 37, disclosed tens of thousands of pages of internal Facebook documents to Congress and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The documents were the basis of a series of articles in the Wall Street Journal that sparked a reckoning in September over what the company knew about how it contributed to harms ranging from its impact on teens' mental health and the extent of misinformation on its platforms, to human traffickers' open use of its services. The documents paint a picture of a company that is often aware of the harms to which it contributes—but is either unwilling or unable to act against them. Haugen's disclosures set Facebook stock on a downward trajectory, formed the basis for eight new whistle-blower complaints to the SEC and have prompted lawmakers around the world to intensify their calls for regulation of the company.
Facebook has rejected Haugen's claims that it puts profits before safety, and says it spends $5 billion per year on keeping its platforms safe. "As a company, we have every commercial and moral incentive to give the maximum number of people as much of a positive experience as possible on our apps," a spokesperson said in a statement.
Although many insiders have blown the whistle on Facebook before, nobody has left the company with the breadth of material that Haugen shared. And among legions of critics in politics, academia and media, no single person has been as effective as Haugen in bringing public attention to Facebook's negative impacts. When Haugen decided to blow the whistle against Facebook late last year, the company employed more than 58,000 people. Many had access to the documents that she would eventually pass to authorities. Why did it take so long for somebody to do what she did?
Read More: How Facebook Forced a Reckoning by Shutting Down the Team That Put People Ahead of Profits
One answer is that blowing the whistle against a multibillion-dollar tech company requires a particular combination of skills, personality traits and circumstances. In Haugen's case, it took one near-death experience, a lost friend, several crushed hopes, a cryptocurrency bet that came good and months in counsel with a priest who also happens to be her mother. Haugen's atypical personality, glittering academic background, strong moral convictions, robust support networks and self-confidence also helped. Hers is the story of how all these factors came together—some by chance, some by design—to create a watershed moment in corporate responsibility, human communication and democracy.
When debate coach Scott Wunn first met a 16-year-old Haugen at Iowa City West High School, she had already been on the team for two years, after finishing junior high a year early. He was an English teacher who had been headhunted to be the debate team's new coach. The school took this kind of extracurricular activity seriously, and so did the young girl with the blond hair. In their first exchange, Wunn remembers Haugen grilling him about whether he would take coaching as seriously as his other duties.
"I could tell from that moment she was very serious about debate," says Wunn, who is now the executive director of the National Speech and Debate Association. "When we ran tournaments, she was the student who stayed the latest, who made sure that all of the students on the team were organized. Everything that you can imagine, Frances would do."
Haugen specialized in a form of debate that specifically asked students to weigh the morality of every issue, and by her senior year, she had become one of the top 25 debaters in the country in her field. "Frances was a math whiz, and she loved political science," Wunn says. In competitive debate, you don't get to decide which side of the issue you argue for. But Haugen had a strong moral compass, and when she was put in a position where she had to argue for something she disagreed with, she didn't lean back on "flash in the pan" theatrics, her former coach remembers. Instead, she would dig deeper to find evidence for an argument she could make that wouldn't compromise her values. "Her moral convictions were strong enough, even at that age, that she wouldn't try to manipulate the evidence such that it would go against her morality," Wunn says.
When Haugen got to college, she realized she needed to master another form of communication. "Because my parents were both professors, I was used to having dinner-table conversations where, like, someone would have read an interesting article that day, and would basically do a five-minute presentation," she says. "And so I got to college, and I had no idea how to make small talk."
Today, Haugen is talkative and relaxed. She's in a good mood because she got to "sleep in" until 8:30 a.m.—later than most other days on her European tour, she says. At one point, she asks if I've seen the TV series Archer and momentarily breaks into a song from the animated sitcom.
After graduating from Olin College of Engineering—where, beyond the art of conversation, she studied the science of computer engineering—Haugen moved to Silicon Valley. During a stint at Google, she helped write the code for Secret Agent Cupid, the precursor to popular dating app Hinge. She took time off to undertake an M.B.A. at Harvard, a rarity for software engineers in Silicon Valley and something she would later credit with helping her diagnose some of the organizational flaws within Facebook. But in 2014, while back at Google, Haugen's trajectory was knocked off course.
Haugen has celiac disease, a condition that means her immune system attacks her own tissues if she eats gluten. (Hence the sushi.) She "did not take it seriously enough" in her 20s, she says. After repeated trips to the hospital, doctors eventually realized she had a blood clot in her leg that had been there for anywhere between 18 months and two years. Her leg turned purple, and she ended up in the hospital for over a month. There she had an allergic reaction to a drug and nearly bled to death. She suffered nerve damage in her hands and feet, a condition known as neuropathy, from which she still suffers today.
"I think it really changes your priorities when you've almost died," Haugen says. "Everything that I had defined myself [by] before, I basically lost." She was used to being the wunderkind who could achieve anything. Now, she needed help cooking her meals. "My recovery made me feel much more powerful, because I rebuilt my body," she says. "I think the part that informed my journey was: You have to accept when you whistle-blow like this that you could lose everything. You could lose your money, you could lose your freedom, you could alienate everyone who cares about you. There's all these things that could happen to you. Once you overcome your fear of death, anything is possible. I think it gave me the freedom to say: Do I want to follow my conscience?"
Once Haugen was out of the hospital, she moved back into her apartment but struggled with daily tasks. She hired a friend to assist her part time. "I became really close friends with him because he was so committed to my getting better," she says. But over the course of six months, in the run-up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, she says, "I just lost him" to online misinformation. He seemed to believe conspiracy theories, like the idea that George Soros runs the world economy. "At some point, I realized I couldn't reach him," she says.
Soon Haugen was physically recovering, and she began to consider re-entering the workforce. She spent stints at Yelp and Pinterest as a successful product manager working on algorithms. Then, in 2018, a Facebook recruiter contacted her. She told him that she would take the job only if she could work on tackling misinformation in Facebook's "integrity" operation, the arm of the company focused on keeping the platform and its users safe. "I took that job because losing my friend was just incredibly painful, and I didn't want anyone else to feel that pain," she says.
Her optimism that she could make a change from inside lasted about two months. Haugen's first assignment involved helping manage a project to tackle misinformation in places where the company didn't have any third-party fact-checkers. Everybody on her team was a new hire, and she didn't have the data scientists she needed. "I went to the engineering manager, and I said, 'This is the inappropriate team to work on this,'" she recalls. "He said, 'You shouldn't be so negative.'" The pattern repeated itself, she says. "I raised a lot of concerns in the first three months, and my concerns were always discounted by my manager and other people who had been at the company for longer."
Before long, her entire team was shifted away from working on international misinformation in some of Facebook's most vulnerable markets to working on the 2020 U.S. election, she says. The documents Haugen would later disclose to authorities showed that in 2020, Facebook spent 3.2 million hours tackling misinformation, although just 13% of that time was spent on content from outside the U.S., the Journal reported. Facebook's spokesperson said in a statement that the company has "dedicated teams with expertise in human rights, hate speech and misinformation" working in at-risk countries.