“I wanted,” says Frances Haugen, “to be able to sleep at night.”
This has become Haugen’s emphatic sine qua non, her non-negotiable clause in every contract, whether business or personal. It’s a point she makes in magazine interviews and newspaper columns and on the radio; it’s one she gestures at in congressional testimonies and tech-forum talks. And it’s one she now details in a memoir, The Power of One: How I Found the Strength to Tell the Truth and Why I Blew the Whistle on Facebook.
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A former product manager on Facebook’s civic integrity team, Haugen rocketed to global recognition by releasing a trove of damning documents—some 22,000 in total, published by The Wall Street Journal under a serial release known as The Facebook Files—that exposed how the social media company knew its algorithms rewarded extremism and chose to obscure it.
Under the influence of unfettered algorithms, she writes, Facebook and its properties had become a hotbed of misinformation, a “spark plug” for political outcry. It stirred and stoked user outrage; it devastated teen girls’ mental health; it amplified inflammatory content later linked to ethnic violence and religious riots. It allowed human traffickers and drug cartels and armed militias to organize on its platforms. It batted away employees ringing alarm bells. “Facebook, just like the Big Tobacco companies before it, had known the toxic truth of its poison,” Haugen writes, “and still fed it to us.”
If Haugen’s Facebook...
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