On one level, Frances Haugen’s new book, “The Power of One: How I Found the Strength to Tell the Truth and Why I Blew the Whistle on Facebook,” is as basic as the title makes it sound. In 2021, Haugen, who had worked at Facebook for two years, took 22,000 pages of documents from inside the company, leaking information that led to a string of devastating stories about the company’s inner workings and a number of congressional and parliamentary hearings. “Facebook knew its platforms were causing harm,” Haugen writes. (The company has since been renamed Meta, but Haugen sticks with Facebook throughout.) “Its stock price continued to soar because nobody else knew.” Profits were contingent on “no one knowing how large the gap between Facebook’s and Instagram’s public narratives and the truth had grown.”
If all Haugen’s book did was present her whistleblowing case (the legal merits of which have yet to be decided), it might still be an important part of the ongoing chronicling of how we allowed social media’s dangers to creep up on us. But what really makes the book worth reading is the broader wisdom in her story (and the absence of the self-importance implied by the book’s unfortunate title).
Haugen began her career at Google in 2006. One of her assignments was helping to create Google Books, back in the innocent time when scanning every book was considered just a service to humanity. Her journey through social media took her from those early days, when the platforms promised...
The Dangote Group has become aware of a publication titled “Aliko Dangote Speaks Out on Why He Distanced Himself from Tony Elumelu,” which is false, malicious, and baseless. At no time did the Pre...