Edited by: TJVNews.com
On Sunday evening, whistleblower Frances Haugen was introduced to the public on CBS’ 60 Minutes. Haugen, a product manager who had been recruited in 2019 for the civic information team at Facebook, revealed herself to be “Sean” the alias that was assigned to her. Prior to working for Facebook, Haugen had worked at Google and Pinterest. Before leaving Facebook’s employ in May, Haugen used the documents she amassed to expose how much Facebook knew about the harms that it was causing and provided the evidence to lawmakers, regulators and the news media, as was reported by the New York Times.
Telling the 60 Minutes team that she became increasingly concerned by what she witnessed firsthand at Facebook, Haugen, 37, asserted that the social media giant put profits before public safety. She said that this prompted her to make copies of internal research done by Facebook and to eventually make them public.
According to a NY Times report, Haugen said, “I’ve seen a bunch of social networks and it was substantially worse at Facebook than what I had seen before. She added, “Facebook, over and over again, has shown it chooses profit over safety.”
After having given documents to the Wall Street Journal in increments over the last few months, the Times reported that Haugen also filed a whistle-blower complaint with the Securities and Exchange Commission, accusing Facebook of misleading investors with public statements that did not match its internal actions. And she has talked with lawmakers such as Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat of Connecticut, and Senator Marsha Blackburn, a Republican of Tennessee, and shared subsets of the documents with them.
Haugen, who will testify before Congress this week, said she hopes that by coming forward the government will put regulations in place to govern the company’s activities, according to an AP report.
At issue are algorithms that govern what shows up on users’ news feeds, and how they favor hateful content. Haugen said a 2018 change to the content flow contributed to more divisiveness and ill will in a network ostensibly created to bring people closer together.
Haugen provided information to the WSJ about how Facebook was aware of the fact that its subsidiary Instagram was having deleterious effects on teenage girls, especially focusing on body image issues.
This in not the first time that ex-employees of Facebook have taken to the air waves to reveal cryptic information about the agenda of the social media giant.
In 2018, the Times reported that former employee from the Cambridge Analytica consulting firm Christopher Wylie had spoken to the New York Times, the London Observer and the Guardian of the UK to let the world know that Cambridge Analytica “had improperly harvested Facebook data to build voter profiles without consent of users.
The Times also reported that later in 2018 Facebook employees began piping up with grudges of their own. The report indicates that these workers provided executive memos and planning documents to such news outlets as Buzzfeed News and The Times.
