A Facebook Reckoning: Revelations from Frances Haugen’s Senate Testimony

Former Facebook employee Frances Haugen left the company in May of 2021. She subsequently handed over thousands of pages of incriminating internal documents which she had collected during her time at Facebook to The Wall Street Journal. On September 13 of 2021, the Journal rolled out “The Facebook Files:” a collection of 11 major articles detailing the contents of Haugen’s leak. On October 5, Haugen testified before a United States Senate committee on commerce, science, and transportation, and asserted that Facebook harms children, sows division and undermines democracy in pursuit of “astronomical profits.”

Who is Frances Haugen

Haugen is a 37-year-old computer science and Harvard Business School graduate. She has worked for Google and Pinterest, and co-founded the dating app Hinge. Haugen Began working for Facebook as a product manager in 2019, just three years after the Cambridge Analytica scandal when Facebook allowed the British consulting firm to collect data from millions of users without their consent for use in political campaigns. In light of Facebook’s reputation at the time, Haugen reportedly aspired to change the company from the inside.

After two years at Facebook, Haugen felt her goal to rectify the ethical issues in the company was going nowhere. She came to realize that Facebook was aware of the harm of its products and was intentionally concealing this knowledge from users and investors. Haugen began to collect evidence of this through Facebook’s internal social network: Workplace. Employees share product research and discuss company strategy on this platform, thus making confidential information available to all company members. As Haugen encountered documents detailing unethical conduct, she took pictures of them and compiled a collection of evidence which exposed the role of Facebook products in aggravating a number of social and political issues across the globe.

Haugen released the documents with the hope that they might increase public pressure for Facebook to change. She underlined that Facebook cares more about profits than public safety in an interview with 60 Minutes in spite of its claim that it does not “build services to make money.”

Haugen has filed a whistleblower complaint with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). If the agency attempts to take civil action against Facebook, Haugen could receive between 10 and 30 percent of any fines Facebook is forced to pay.

What did the documents contain?

Over a dozen news organizations have reviewed the redacted versions of the documents and identified a number of key takeaways.

As reported by CNN, the documents show that Facebook was fundamentally unprepared to deal with the January 6 “Stop the Steal” insurrection movement. This contradicts Facebook’s Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, who stated that the company “took down QAnon, Proud Boys, Stop the Steal, anything that was talking about possible violence” in the weeks before the attack on the U.S. capital. In fact, the documents reveal that, leading up to the insurrection, almost all of the fastest growing groups on Facebook were related to the Stop the Steal movement.

One of the leaked documents contains a picture of a table labelled “US2020 Levers, previously rolled back,” referring to the guard rails on misinformation and harmful content that Facebook removed before the 2020 presidential election. It is unclear from public statements why Facebook rolled back these measures, and Haugen asserted that the measures were only reimplemented after the insurrection flared up.

The Washington Post commented on internal documents surrounding body image, teen mental health and appearance-based social comparison on Instagram, a social media network owned by Facebook. One document found that “social comparison is worse on Instagram,” and that “social comparison journeys mimic the grief cycle.” In response to this, the document said that the company must “engage at each step of the social comparison journey by creating targeted product interventions.” The documents noted that “mental health outcomes related to [social comparison] can be severe,” acknowledging the role of Instagram in prompting or exacerbating eating disorders, body dysmorphia, body dissatisfaction, depression and loneliness. Another document blatantly stated, “we make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls.”

The Atlantic reported on another shocking revelation from the documents. In 2019, a BBC report found that a broad human trafficking network for domestic workers was facilitated by Facebook and Instagram, aided by algorithmically boosted hashtags. The internal documents released by Haugen make clear that this issue was known to Facebook before the BBC inquiry, and that the company only took action when Apple threatened to pull Instagram and Facebook from the App Store.

According to the Atlantic report, the documents show that Facebook has the most harmful impact in vulnerable and unstable areas of the world. Facebook is aware that its products “facilitate hate speech in the Middle East, cartels in Mexico, ethnic cleansing in Ethiopia, extremist anti-Muslim rhetoric in India and sex trafficking in Dubai.” In an internal report from March 2021, Facebook admitted, “we frequently observe highly coordinated intentional activity… by problematic actors:” that is, “particularly prevalent… in At-Risk Countries and Contexts,” yet it stated that “current mitigation strategies are not enough.”

An internal Facebook report from the winter of 2020 found that only 6 percent of Arabic-language hate content on Instagram was detected by Facebook’s systems. According to the documents, only 13 percent of Facebook’s misinformation-moderation staff hours were devoted to non-U.S. countries in spite of the fact that more than 90 percent of Facebook’s users do not reside in the United States. Despite at least 160 languages being spoken on the platform, Facebook has created AI-detection systems for only a fraction of those languages.

Speaking to the Observer about her decision to come forward as a whistleblower, Haugen said, “I did what I thought was necessary to save the lives of people, especially in the global South, who I think are being endangered by Facebook’s prioritization of profits over people.”

The Senate Hearing

On October 5, Haugen testified to a United States Senate committee.

Haugen emphasized that Facebook knows that its algorithm is harmful to users. She stated that Facebook's advertising-based business model needs people to stay on its platform for as long as possible, and the company exploits negative emotion to accomplish this.

Lawmakers at the hearing were particularly concerned with the impact of Instagram on children. Subcommittee Chair Richard Blumenthal said, “Facebook exploited teens using powerful algorithms that amplified their insecurities.”

Haugen also spoke to the structural issues faced by the company, stating that, “Facebook is stuck in a cycle where it struggles to hire. That causes it to understaff projects, which causes scandals, which then makes it harder to hire.” During her time at Facebook, Haugen “worked on the counter-espionage team, and at any given time… could only handle a third of the cases,” due to lack of manpower.

Haugen does not believe Facebook should be broken up, but instead encourages more stringent regulation of the platform. Chair Blumenthal is discussing the proposal to allow private citizens to sue Facebook and other social media companies for harm caused by their algorithms.

Currently, a law known as Section 230 immunizes social media companies from being sued over what users post, however Blumenthal is interested in “curtailing that legal shield and immunity so as to give victims… some recourse.”

Other legislative responses currently being considered include a national privacy law and stronger safeguards for children online. Lawmakers insist that Haugen’s leak of internal documents and Senate testimony have motivated Capitol Hill to take action against Facebook.

In response to the Senate hearing, Facebook spokesman Andy Stone said, “we continue to make significant improvements to tackle misinformation and harmful content.” Stone also questioned Haugen’s credibility on matters pertaining teen mental health, stating that “Frances Haugen did not work on child safety or Instagram, or research these issues, and has no direct knowledge of the topic from her work at Facebook.”

However, Samidh Chakrabati, the former leader of the Civic Integrity Political Misinformation team at Facebook, said on Twitter, “there are countless other integrity professionals with experience on the issues raised today… who similarly agree with the substantive points shared at the hearing.”

Going Forward

This leak may inspire other whistleblowers to come forward. According to Haugen’s legal team, inquiries from other potential whistleblowers have been raised, and another SEC complaint was filed in October.

The damning evidence brought to light by Frances Haugen has ignited a push to regulate Facebook and other social media giants. Haugen herself has expressed a desire to “start a youth movement,” to restore power among a portion of the population whose lives to date have been unquantifiably influenced by social media. Hopefully, this most recent leak will be enough to actualize Haugen’s desire for large-scale change.

- Saoirse Aherne