The whistleblower whose explosive revelations about her employer inspired Aaron Sorkin’s new film tells Carole Cadwalladr that, despite Silicon Valley’s power, ‘we have the ability to change a lot of things’
Frances Haugen was not a natural whistleblower. She was a true believer, a data scientist who believed the company’s mission that “connecting” the world would lead to sunlit uplands of peace, love and outbreaks of democracy around the world. Slowly, she began to realise this was not the case.
The result is depicted in The Social Reckoning, Aaron Sorkin’s long-awaited sequel to The Social Network, which opens nationwide on Friday. Haugen brought thousands of documents out of the firm, laboriously photographing them one by one and handing them over to Wall Street Journal journalist Jeff Horwitz.
I met Haugen back in 2021, when she came to Britain to give evidence to parliamentarians shortly after testifying in front of Congress, and in the five years since, less than nothing has happened to hold Facebook – now re-named Meta in an ultimately futile attempt to wipe the stench of scandal off it – to account, or any other Silicon Valley tech firm.
Mark Zuckerberg, like all the other bros, has enjoyed total impunity despite playing a “determining role” – the United Nations’ words – in stirring up a genocide in Myanmar and, as we see in the film, fomenting an insurrection.
There has been no justice and no accountability. Eight years after the Nerve team – then at the Observer...
THE BILLING GRID A weekly column on research billing and coverage analysis, by Krishma Shah A coordinator submits a lab requisition. The central lab bills it to the site. The site bills it to Medi...