Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook co-founder and chief executive, is “running away to the metaverse” to avoid resolving the divisive chaos his social media platform has unleashed on the world, said whistleblower and data scientist Frances Haugen in Cambridge on Friday evening.
Speaking to a packed house at the Babbage lecture theatre, the former Facebook software executive pointed the finger at the Silicon Valley company’s director of communications, Nick Clegg, for enabling and encouraging the billionaire’s flights of fancy, and called on those close to Zuckerberg to encourage him to address the crisis because “until Mark gets to heal he can’t heal us”.
Born in Iowa in 1984, Frances Haugen’s degree was in electrical and computer engineering, with an MBA acquired at Harvard Business School in 2011. She began her career at Google as a software engineer that year, rising to product manager. After four years at Google she went to work for Yelp, and then Pinterest. She joined Facebook as a product manager in June 2019 and stayed until May 2021.
During her time at Facebook, Haugen became increasingly alarmed by the choices the company makes, “prioritising their own profits over public safety and putting people’s lives at risk”. Last summer, she handed tens of thousands of pages of internal Facebook documents to the US Congress and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The documents were published in the Wall Street Journal as ‘The Facebook Files’.
The tranche of data reveal...
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