Frances Haugen will forever be known as Facebook’s whistleblower. In her final weeks at the company, she worked daily with a Wall Street Journal reporter to drain Facebook’s servers of damning documents that showed how the platform and its leader, Mark Zuckerberg, refused to address major problems despite well-documented pleas from employees.
On September 13, 2021, the Journal began publishing “The Facebook Files”—an expose that surfaced, among other things, the mental health toll Instagram was taking on teenage girls, Facebook’s secret program giving special status to millions of influential users, and the algorithms that promoted the worst kind of content. At the time, the source of that shocking cache was unnamed. Three weeks later, Haugen revealed herself as the whistleblower when she appeared on 60 Minutes. Haugen, then a 37-year-old data scientist, had worked in Silicon Valley for 15 years after a bucolic childhood in Iowa. She was precise and unsparing in her decoding of complex Facebook documents.
The headlines came from the contents of the files, but an untold story was why Haugen did what no other employee of Facebook, now called Meta, had ever dared. Haugen drew her courage to blow that fateful whistle after a cathartic decade in which she confronted personal, medical, and financial woes, She’d also seen a friend swept into the rabbit hole of misinformation. When she came face to face with what she considered Facebook’s intolerable refusal to fix its problems, she was ready to turn on her employer to alert the public.
Haugen has now published a book telling that story: The Power of One: How I Found the Strength to Tell the Truth and Why I Blew the Whistle on Facebook. It’s both a call to fix social media and a memoir of her journey through Silicon Valley, describing her difficult path to adulthood while working at Google, Yelp, Pinterest, and ultimately, Facebook. It also tells the story of how she became one of her former employer’s most potent public critics, uniquely qualified because of her technical grasp and inside experience. She’s since launched a nonprofit called Beyond the Screen to educate people about social media.
I first met Haugen in 2007 when I was embedded in an around-the-world business trip with Google’s young associate product managers, and I was struck by her moral sense—she bristled at instances when the world wasn’t working as it should. I also noticed her struggle to fit into her cohort of mainly male engineers a couple of years her senior.
Now, with the arrival of her memoir, I took an opportunity to discuss not just her book, but also her current life as a crusader for safer social media and the possible liberation of Mark Zuckerberg, who she sees as a prisoner much in the way Brittney Spears once was. The interview is edited for length and clarity.
Steven Levy: You’ve already blown the whistle on Facebook, done a lot of media, and testified to and advised legislators and regulators. What did you hope to do with this book?
Frances Haugen: My original intention was to write a book about agency. People have a lot of reasons why they don’t follow their hearts. They’re like, “If I do what I think is right, I might lose my job, I might be impoverished, I might lose my home and live in a box on the street.” I never got to the point of being homeless, but in my late twenties, I went through a laundry list of horrors and learned I could stand back up. That gave me the freedom to follow my heart when it came to blowing the whistle on Facebook. But in the process of writing the whole thing, I realized that the book that the world needs right now is a conversation about social media. There are 100,000 more words about agency that are not in that book. But we need to do things like pass transparency laws.
I’m not sure that those 100,000 more words are needed. You talked a lot about your personal story, so the book is sort of a roman à clef leading to your decision to become a whistleblower, implicitly urging others to do the same. What made you so adamant on calling people to action?
We are starting from such a low point. Our laws were written about technology from the ’80s and ’90s, in a world where today’s technology was unimaginable. My hope is for people to understand why we have to act. If we really want to do culture change, we need a different power balance with these companies. We have to change the expectations about what we’re entitled to in terms of information.
During the recent US congressional hearing on AI, senator after senator said that we screwed up with social media, so let’s get this right. But social media still goes on, and Congress hasn’t passed even basic laws to address its ills.
People are still trapped on social media. As people begin to take one step back from the AI hype ledge, they’re going to begin seeing we actually have very pressing problems today. And those begin with actually addressing social media.
Can you point to progress?
We are starting to see an inflection point with regard to social media and children in the United States. Look at the US surgeon general’s advisory about social media last month. If you had asked me in 2021 whether we would have a cigarette moment with social media in the next two years, I would have said, “There’s no way that’s happening.” And yet the surgeon general came out and said social media can be harmful to children.
Do you think that that warning is going to make a significant difference? It only asks for voluntary changes.
Since the 1960s, there have been very few such advisories, and those were things that resulted in protections we take for granted today. Historically, within two to three years of most of those advisories happening, some kind of large-scale action takes place.
You believe those laws will come?
Will we get the laws we need in the next two years? Very unlikely. But I think we’ll get the laws we need in the next five to 10 years.
Meanwhile, Meta has refocused on the metaverse and generative AI.
I worry about the rise of those. Do not make fun of virtual reality. Because all the problems people are flagging—the masks are too heavy, the images are pixelated, the batteries don’t last long enough—are going to get solved in five to 10 years. I worry that we’re going to put grandma in a VR headset, or if you have a really disruptive kid in school, instead of having a health aide, you will just digitally sedate them. I think we do need to start having those conversations now.
Since your whistleblowing, has Meta addressed the problems you exposed?
I’m assuming it is probably worse than it was because Mark [Zuckerberg] fired a lot of people this year. I think things got better for maybe the year after I came out. But once [Twitter CEO] Elon Musk was able to fire his safety teams and not face any consequences, Mark has said publicly that he thought that Elon showed the value of tearing off the Band-Aid. I think a lot of Facebook’s stock market rise in the last six months has been that if you fire your safety teams, your expenses go down. Meanwhile, a lot of my favorite researchers inside the company are not inside the company anymore. And it’s not because they voluntarily left.
I spoke to researchers who wrote some of the documents you exposed, and found it fascinating that they stuck with the company for so long.
It’s a really brutal choice. If you leave, there’s one less good person who’s working on these issues. You place a really immense psychic burden on people because they know, if they leave, it’s not like the problems are going to go away. It’s just that they won’t be working on them anymore.
Mark Zuckerberg himself is not much of a character in your book, but you do recount a few times when he rejects some initiatives that might have mitigated some misinformation or toxicity on his platform. What are your views on your former boss of bosses?
I feel a great deal of pity for him. He has been the CEO since he was 19 years old, and he’s now 39—that’s half his life. All the other big founders have stepped down. Imagine if someone tells you the thing that you’ve spent half your life on is hurting people. It’s almost an impossible thing to believe. He can’t be objective—he’s surrounded himself with a very limited number of people who have a vested material interest in keeping him right there.
He’s definitely heard about harm directly—from regulators and litigators, and in his face in legislative hearings.
But look at how he frames things in Congress. He always says things like, “We have an inherent tension between freedom of speech and safety.” He never says, “We could change our algorithms.” There were a huge number of people [inside Facebook] who were developing ways to address these problems, but they require changing the system of management. Facebook has a culture that devalues humans. It’s tragic. Then he goes on podcasts and says things like, “When I get up in the morning and I look at my phone, it feels like I’m getting punched in the stomach.”
That was the Joe Rogan podcast.
Remember the Free Britney movement? Mark is in the same position. There’s a whole apparatus inside Facebook that needs to keep Mark exactly where he is. I think we need a Free Mark movement. Because if anyone says in public, “I feel like I’m getting punched in the stomach when I do my work,” the question is, “Why are you still doing it then?”
[Zuckerberg did respond to Haugen’s accusations, though not naming her, after her 60 Minutes appearance, saying that she painted “a false picture” of the company. “At the heart of these accusations is the idea that we prioritize profit over safety and well-being,” he wrote in a Facebook post. “That’s just not true.”]
Let’s go back to the idea of agency. Blowing the whistle seems to have been cathartic for you in that sense.
A huge fraction of my life I spent trying to be smaller. When I was in elementary school, I learned that people don’t like people who are outliers. People have resentment for people who are different. In our school we had a chess club I did not join during my kindergarten year, which is what the kids who were hardcore did, I joined in third grade. In retrospect, I didn’t show up in my own life. In my jobs, I liked hiding with the data set.
The last two years have been a really interesting process for me. I was terrified when I went into the Senate to testify. I remember just sitting there kind of numb afterward; all the adrenaline was gone. And now I’ve been forced to show up in my own life. I’ve learned that it is important to say what you mean, and it’s important to say what you think is needed. And that you can hide or you can be out in the open.
Do you feel that Silicon Valley itself, not just Meta, suffers from those problems?
There are systemic challenges. Venture capital funding is raised on two-year increments. You don’t come in and say, “this is a continuous process where we’ll figure things out”—value has to be created quickly. That creates different kinds of thinking and different kinds of cultures. Facebook would not have gotten probably as big as it did otherwise. It might not have won the social media wars if it had to be as responsible as we’re currently asking them to be. Growth and safety do trade off. I think Facebook could be safe today and profitable. And I think we’re seeing a replay of that right now with large language models.
Zuckerberg—and others in charge of companies with leakers—say employees sharing internal documents are disloyal and betraying the company that pays their salary. What’s your response to that?
If I hadn’t watched the human consequences of organizational underinvestment [to fix the product] and a lack of organizational commitment, I don’t know if I could have acted like I did. I watched multiple friends really profoundly burn out, developing mental health issues. Whistleblowing made me loyal to my coworkers. And I think I’m loyal to the long-term success of Facebook, because I don’t think Facebook can succeed in the next 20 years unless it figures out how to be a positive force in society.
So Facebook should honor you for calling it out?
I don’t need to be honored, I live by the ocean. What I would love is for us to get this all squared away. Then I can go back to being a data scientist and code by the ocean.
You haven’t poisoned your prospects by being a whistleblower?
No. Since I came out, I’ve gotten at least five or six job offers, largely from other social media companies. I have tried really, really hard not to villainize Facebook, and to be fair. There are a number of senior people at companies—you’d be surprised to hear the names—who’ve told me, “We’ve been watching, we’re impressed with how you handled things.”
Facebook among them?
No. I’m a persona non grata there.
Meanwhile, for all the torments you describe in your book—lack of respect, dire health issues, a broken marriage, and misery in your job that led to a scary decision to go public—you seem happy now. You’re remarried, you live in a beach paradise in Puerto Rico, people solicit your view as an expert, and you’ve just published your book.
I think it’s a happy ending. I came into whistleblowing with very, very low expectations. I wanted to be able to sleep at night.
