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A Facebook whistleblower who provided internal documents to the Wall Street Journal and United States Congress detailing the company's research revealed her identity during an exclusive interview with 60 Minutes on Sunday (October 3) night.
Frances Haugen, 37, who lists herself as a former product manager on Facebook's civic misinformation team on her personal website, accused her former employer of committing what "feels like a betrayal of democracy to me."
On her personal website, Haugen described her time with company, noting that she "became increasingly alarmed by the choices the company makes prioritizing their own profits over public safety — putting people’s lives at risk. As a last resort and at great personal risk, Frances made the courageous act to blow the whistle on Facebook."
Haugen had also previously worked as a product manager at Pinterest, Yelp and Google, according to her LinkedIn profile, as well as working as the technical co-founder of the dating app Hinge, adding that she took its orginal incarnation, Secret Agent Cupid, to market.
“I’ve seen a bunch of social networks and it was substantially worse at Facebook than anything I’d seen before,” Haugen told 60 Minutes.
Jeff Horwitz, the Wall Street Journal reporter who published the series of articles based on information provided by Haugen, also confirmed her identity as source responsible for the Facebook information on Sunday (October 4) night via Twitter after 60 Minutes shared the interview on YouTube.
Documents shared with the Wall Street Journal by Haugen revealed Facebook executives were aware of negative impacts to young users of its platform, which included an internal document finding 6% of American teenage users traced the urge to kill themselves to Instagram.
Facebook representatives accused the Journal's reporting of cherr-picking data, arguing that many users found positive impacts from using its social media platforms.
“Every day our teams have to balance protecting the ability of billions of people to express themselves openly with the need to keep our platform a safe and positive place,” Facebook spokesperson Lena Pietsch said in a statement after Haugen’s identity reveal via NBC News. “We continue to make significant improvements to tackle the spread of misinformation and harmful content. To suggest we encourage bad content and do nothing is just not true.”
Haugen said she decided to make Facebook's internal communication public when she realized it needed to be released "in a systemic way" and "get out enough that no one can question that this is real," leading her copy and release tens of thousands of pages of documents, according to 60 Minutes.
Haugen credited the 2020 election as a turning point at Facebook, as the company announced it was dissolving the "Civic Integrity" team, which she was assigned to, after the election and, less than two months later, social media played a crucial role in the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
“When they got rid of Civic Integrity, it was the moment where I was like, ‘I don’t trust that they’re willing to actually invest what needs to be invested to keep Facebook from being dangerous,’” Haugen said via 60 Minutes.
You can watch Haugen's 60 Minutes interview here.