Who is Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen?
Former Facebook employee Frances Haugen testifies during a Senate Committee. Picture: Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Frances Haugen, 37, is a former employee of Facebook who worked as a product manager.
She began working for the social media company in 2019, leaving them in May.
Ms Haugen, according to her website, worked on the Civic Misinformation team, “which dealt with issues related to democracy and misinformation, and later also worked on counter-espionage”.
Before being recruited by Facebook, she worked for 15 years at tech companies including Google, Pinterest and Yelp.
She has a degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Olin College and an MBA from Harvard.
Ms Haugen copied thousands of pages of Facebook’s internal research and leaked them to the Wall Street Journal (WSJ).
The WSJ ran a series of stories packaged as the Facebook Files.
The mid-September publication of the expose revealed Facebook’s own internal research had concluded the social network’s attention-seeking algorithms had helped foster political dissent and contributed to mental health and emotional problems among teenagers, especially girls.
Facebook asserted the WSJ had cherry-picked the most damaging information in the internal documents to cast the company in the worst possible light.
However, the revelations prompted an indefinite delay in the rollout of a kids' version of its popular app Instagram.
Facebook maintains Ms Haugne’s allegations are misleading and insists there is no evidence to support the premise that it is the primary cause of social polarisation.
While working at Facebook, Ms Haugen became “increasingly alarmed by the choices the company makes prioritizing their own profits over public safety and putting people's lives at risk”.
That is according to her website, which adds that she blew the whistle as “a last resort”.
On Sunday, Ms Haugen was interviewed on US show .
In that interview, she claimed that Facebook prematurely turned off safeguards designed to thwart misinformation after Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in last year’s elections in a moneymaking move.
She also asserted that a 2018 change to the content flow in Facebook’s news feeds contributed to more divisiveness and ill will in a network ostensibly created to bring people closer together.
On Tuesday, Ms Haugen appeared before the US Congress giving evidence to the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Consumer Protection.
She told Congress that the social network’s products harm children and fuel polarisation in the US, and its executives refuse to make changes because they elevate profits over safety.
Facebook responded by saying in a statement that Ms Haugen “worked for the company for less than two years, had no direct reports, never attended a decision-point meeting with C-level executives – and testified more than six times to not working on the subject matter in question.”
The statement added that Facebook doesn’t agree with “her characterisation of the many issues she testified about”.
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