11.29.2021 07:00 AM
The face behind the Facebook papers tells how she became Mark Zuckerberg’s nightmare—and thinks people can still make a positive impact at the company.
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When the Wall Street Journal launched a series of explosive articles based on internal Facebook documents in September, people naturally wondered about the source. Apparently, an unnamed employee had left the company, taking with her hundreds of documents that exposed how much Facebook (which changed its name to Meta several weeks later) understood the harm it was doing, and how insufficient its remedies were. In October, 60 Minutes provided the answer: The whistleblower was a 37-year-old former product manager named Frances Haugen.
I almost did a spit take when I saw her face on the screen. Though I hadn’t spoken to Haugen for some time, I had gotten to know her fairly well on a 16-day trip around the world in 2007, led by Google vice president Marissa Mayer. Haugen had been one of 18 Google associate product managers on the trip, and as an embedded journalist, I had interviewed and hung out with all of them.
The Frances Haugen that I saw on television that night—and the one who later testified to Congress, to the British Parliament, and the EU—was in many ways unchanged from the 22-year-old Googler in my traveling party: impeccably organized, a bit nerdy,...
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