For about six hours on Monday, billions of users around the world cannot access their accounts on Facebook, the largest social media network in the world, and family apps, Instagram and WhatsApp. According to the company, global blackouts are caused by internal technical problems. But this is not the biggest crisis to hit the social media giant this week.
World blackouts come when the company grappled with a result of a series of spicy reports by the Wall Street Journal based on the wealth of internal documents provided by the Reporter.
On Sunday, in the episode of CBS ’60 minutes’, whistleblower reveals its identity. Frances Haugen, who worked on Facebook for two years before leaving in May, claiming that the company knew how the platform was used to disseminate wrong information, hatred and violence.
The crisis deepened for social media networks after Haugen testified before the Senate Subcommittime Tuesday, accused Facebook harmed children, and weakened democracy.
So, who is Frances Haugen?
Haugen works on Facebook for almost two years as a product manager in the company’s Integrity Civic Team. His job is largely focused on tracking the wrong information dissemination on the platform and ensuring that the platform is not used to disrupt democracy.
Before working on Facebook, the 37-year-old engineer has a successful technology career, works as a product manager in several top technology companies, including Google, Pinterest and Yelp. While pursuing a management program at Harvard Business School in 2010, he jointly founded a dating platform called Secret Agent Cupid, which later became a popular ‘hinge’ dating application, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Haugen said that his desire to fight the wrong information on the footprint of social media returned to 2014, when he saw a family friend being obsessed with the online forum that touted the theory of the white nationalist conspiracy. “It’s one thing to learn the wrong information, it’s another to lose someone for it,” he told the Wall Street Journal. “Many people who work on these products only see the positive side of things.”
So, when a Facebook recruiter approached him in 2018, Haugen insisted that he wanted a job related to Democracy and the spread of false information. In 2019, he joined the company’s Civic Integrity Team, which viewed election interference throughout the world. The team, however, was dissolved immediately after the US presidential election in 2020.
In the interview of the ’60 minutes, Haugen said he began to lose trust on Facebook as soon as the team was dissolved. The work previously carried out by the Civic Integrity Team was then divided between a number of different departments, Facebook said. But the company was not enough to prevent the wrong information, he argued.
“There is a conflict of interest between what is good for the public and what is good for Facebook,” he said during the interview. “And Facebook repeatedly chose to optimize his own interests such as producing more money.”