Whistleblower Frances Haugen Still Believes in Silicon Valley

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.

If I were to guess which one of those 18 associate product managers would become a whistleblower, it would have been you.

And one of the unfortunate things about how engineering is often taught now is that they fill people's schedules so full with requirements that you lose some of that self-definition period that college is traditionally about.

I feel very grateful that I had that experience because it gives you a chance to kind of establish how you make decisions, and what is important to you.

I don't want this to be construed as criticism of Google, because even my own doctors were not able to put their finger on it.

I wish someone had counseled me to go on disability because I would have probably gone back to Google after I got better.

I don't think there's an inherent rot or something like that.

I do believe that there is a need for transparency across any power, any platform that has a lot of power.

If anything, Facebook is a flat enough organization that if a lot of people came there determined to fix it, I think they would actually have a positive impact.

And none of this would have happened.

At some point, I would have had to still go.

But I don't think I would have left at that instant.

I did not believe that they could solve their problems on their own.

I don't think I was the only one who felt that Facebook had kind of given up on its mission or wasn't taking it seriously.

I volunteer at Burning Man as a ranger because I believe people change by being helped.

I don't believe people change by being shamed.

I knew Facebook had issues before I joined and I'd lived with some of the personal consequences of that because I had a friend who was radicalized.

And because Facebook was my fourth social media company, I could say with credibility that things there were substantially worse than I had seen in other places?

By the time they blow the whistle, they are wrecks because they have held the secret inside of them for so long.

When I coached debate, I'd have these hypothetical conversations with my 14-year-olds where you ask questions like, if you could save a life, what would you be willing to sacrifice?

I genuinely believe that there are tens of millions of lives on the line right now.

I sold my house when Covid came, so I don't have a mortgage.

I love children, I want to have children, but I'm also 37, and I don't have kids now.

I would say even within a month of beginning to talk to Whistleblower Aid, they were like, “You are better at recruiting help for yourself than any client we've ever had before.

I have a question about the documents that you took with you from Facebook.

If you want to get specific things, it's actually quite difficult because you have to just keep scrolling and incrementally load, and all sorts of things.

Someone else would have more trouble, but I've designed multiple search engines at this point.

Facebook could fix all of this by releasing all these mythical positive documents that I didn't include.

Do you feel that the corpus of documents you provided is an accurate representation of the way Facebook polices its content.

But the idea that he can afford 10,000 engineers to build video games when we don't have even basic safety systems for huge swaths of Facebook users, I think is really negligent.

I do think renaming the company Meta represents a meta problem of Facebook's, which is they always prioritize growth and expansion over making sure the things they have already built are safe.

Facebook doesn't want to take responsibility for the fact that they bought the right to be the internet for the majority of languages in the world?

It’s like there was a factory producing a widget, and around that factory, kids were getting cancer.

But with Facebook, most people aren't aware of the idea that we have no transparency into the system.

They may understand subjectively that Facebook makes them feel bad [but they don’t have the data].

Facebook does not want us to see what happens; they don't want to give out even aggregate data.

When they have given out some aggregate data, like the academic consortium a couple months ago, they literally gave false data.

Even with more transparency at a moderate level, we would have very different conversations.

Does Facebook deserve to have 17 percent profit margins, or, heaven forbid, 12 percent profit margins.

It's not a question of whether we have Facebook or not, but whether we deserve to have a Facebook that is safe.

I haven't seen reporting on that as much as I would have liked.

People came back to me and said, “Well, how do we prove what level of concentration we should have?” I was shaking my head on the inside, because like, that was a philosophical question, not an empirical question.

Because we don't have things like simulated social networks, we can't run the network a bunch of different times to test different concentrations?