Frances Haugen, a Facebook whistleblower, is ready for her second act.
Nine months after the former project manager at the world's largest social network published troves of internal corporate documents, which painted a picture of senior executives and engineers playing fast and loose with how harmful content spread online, she is now raising up to $5 million to start a nonprofit organization aimed at boosting accountability within these platforms.
"Before (my revelations), each of us could only see what was on our own screen," Haugen told Digital Bridge, POLITICO's transatlantic tech newsletter. "What changed with the disclosures is that we now know what’s going on beyond our own screens. It changed the calculations on how we all approach these companies."
That shift — the ability to take a wider view of social media's roles — is baked into her organization, which she plans to call Beyond the Screen. Currently, it's running on a shoestring budget with only three full-time employees, including Haugen and two other colleagues, who are split between Puerto Rico and Argentina.
Not surprisingly, Haugen wants to pull back the curtain on a number of potentially harmful practices that were made public through her disclosures to the U.S. government and scores of media organizations around the world. For its part, Meta, Facebook's parent company, denies it promotes its own financial gain over the well-being of its billions of users worldwide.
Still, the former Facebook employee,...
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