Photo: ROY ROCHLIN/AFP
Frances Haugen felt she had no choice but to blow the whistle over Facebook's lack of action to improve the safety of its platform.
Haugen worked as a product manager on the civic integrity team at Facebook for two years, before smuggling about 22,000 internal documents from the tech giant's Silicon Valley headquarters.
These documents revealed the social network knew from its own research that it was damaging teenage mental health, amplifying hate and ethnic violence, and undermining democracy.
In 2021, Haugen shared the documents with United States authorities and the Wall Street Journal.
She tells her personal story and continues her call for big tech to improve its transparency and accountability in her new book, The Power of One: How I Found the Strength to Tell the Truth and Why I Blew the Whistle on Facebook.
Haugen's decision to gather sensitive information and release it publicly was driven by a desire to be able to sleep at night, she told Afternoons.
"I felt in many ways like Facebook had taken my future from me, that I didn't have a choice whether to act or not, because if I didn't act, I would still pay the costs of it in the future," she said.
The definitive moment that spurred her to speak out was when the civic integrity group she worked for was dissolved by Facebook after the 2020 US national election, she said.
"It became obvious to me Facebook was not willing to commit the resources in an ongoing way to be the change that was...
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