The woman whose revelations have rocked Facebook tells how spending time with her mother, a priest, motivated her to speak out This was not Frances Ha

Frances Haugen: ‘I never wanted to be a whistleblower. But lives were in danger’

submited by

Style Pass

2021-10-24 03:00:04

The woman whose revelations have rocked Facebook tells how spending time with her mother, a priest, motivated her to speak out

This was not Frances Haugen’s plan A. The Facebook whistleblower says she does not like being the centre of attention, but what she saw while working at Mark Zuckerberg’s social media empire compelled her into action – and made her famous.

“When I look at what I did, this was not my plan A. It wasn’t my plan B, it wasn’t my plan C. It was like my plan J or something,” she laughs. “No one sat me down and said ‘what I want you to do is whistleblow’.”

But that is what Haugen did. In May this year she left her position as a product manager at the social media giant and took tens of thousands of internal documents with her. The documents have triggered a maelstrom of allegations, including that Facebook knew its products were damaging teenagers’ mental health, were fomenting ethnic violence in countries such as Ethiopia and were failing to curb misinformation before the 6 January Washington riots. On Monday, Haugen will take her damning views of the company to Westminster when she testifies before MPs and peers. Meanwhile, Facebook spirals deeper into crisis.

Haugen, 37, says the turning point came when she moved in with her mother, who had given up an academic career to become a priest. “I am really lucky that my mother is an episcopal priest,” says Haugen, who was born and raised in Iowa. “I lived with her for six months last year and I had such profound distress because I was seeing these things inside of Facebook and I was certain it was not going to be fixed inside of Facebook.”