A former Facebook employee-turned-whistleblower has finally come forward.
The night before a worldwide crash causedFacebook and its family of apps to go offlineon Monday, former Facebook product manager Frances Haugen revealed her identity on60 Minutesto discuss why she recently leaked the company’s internal documents to lawmakers and theWall Street Journal.
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Representatives for Facebook did not immediately respond to PEOPLE’s request for comment.
“The thing I saw at Facebook over and over again was there were conflicts of interest between what was good for the public and what was good for Facebook. And Facebook, over and over again, chose to optimize for its own interests, like making more money,” Haugen, 37, said in the60 Minutesinterview, which aired on Sunday.
Robert Fortunato for CBS News/60MINUTES
Before joining Facebook, Haugen earned a degree in computer engineering from the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering and a master’s degree in business from Harvard, according to herLinkedInprofile. She also worked for Facebook competitors such as Google, Yelp and Pinterest. After joining Facebook in June 2019, Haugen left her position in May.
“I’ve seen a bunch of social networks and it was substantially worse at Facebook than anything I’d seen before,” Haugen said on60 Minutes.
Today, it is one of the most valuable companies in the world with a market cap of919.79 billion as of Monday afternoon(the company’s stock fell after Haugen’s interview and the outage that followed). Aside from its main site, Facebook further increased its reach with the purchases of wildly popular apps Instagram, in 2012, and WhatsApp, in 2014.
“Imagine you know what’s going on inside of Facebook and you know no one on the outside knows,” Haugen said on60 Minutes. “I knew what my future looked like if I continued to stay inside of Facebook, which is person after person after person has tackled this inside of Facebook and ground themselves to the ground.”
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“When we live in an information environment that is full of angry, hateful, polarizing content it erodes our civic trust, it erodes our faith in each other, it erodes our ability to want to care for each other, the version of Facebook that exists today is tearing our societies apart and causing ethnic violence around the world,” she later said in the interview.
Facebook’s director of policy communications, Lena Pietsch, responded toCBS Newswith several statements regarding Haugen’s allegations.
“Every day our teams have to balance protecting the right of billions of people to express themselves openly with the need to keep our platform a safe and positive place,” Pietsch said, in part. “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.”
While speaking with60 Minutes, Haugen said she empathized with Facebook CEO Zuckerberg for what the platform has grown into.
“I have a lot of empathy for Mark. and Mark has never set out to make a hateful platform,” she said. “But he has allowed choices to be made where the side effects of those choices are that hateful, polarizing content gets more distribution and more reach.”
source: people.com
