Facebook Whistleblower Blasts Refusal to Fund 45 More Child Safety Staff

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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SPEAKER_2 (0:30)

Maybe walk me through when you were having a meeting with Wall Street Journal, and you're like, should I do this, should I not? I don't want to do it. I know what you're asking me.

Maybe, you know, I should. And then all of a sudden, you're like, I have all the documents. I took all the pictures.

I'm coming out. I think the world needs to know. What was that process?

Frances Haugen (0:45)

Sure. So when I originally came to Jeff, my main issue was we had done internal research where we had talked to political parties in Europe, and they had said, hey, we are intentionally running different political positions post you changing the algorithm. So the idea that a private company can make a decision about what information we get to see or not see, and that public entities, public political parties are saying, we don't give voters the same options because of choices you made in Menlo Park. That seems like a thing that the public had a right to know. So initially, that was my big focus was saying like, hey, they know what's going on. They're not telling people our elections are being influenced, even in the options they get to choose.

I worked with Jeff. We always try to leave this part slightly ambiguous. I've been told by my lawyers not to give too many details exactly on timeline on a variety of things. But the vast majority of what I brought forward came out in just the last few weeks. So it was one of these things where I cared a lot about these questions on platform design and algorithms and like how content censorship AIs work, that kind of thing. In the last couple weeks, that's when we started grabbing things like stuff around kids, the stuff on teen mental health. I knew that I had no business case to touch that. Like I worked on foreign governments interfering in the United States and interfering around the world. I had lots of reasonable business cases to touch that information. I never worked on kids' mental health beyond like child predators.

And only then like as in the larger threat intelligence framework. And so when we started grabbing that kind of information, I assumed Facebook would catch me.

SPEAKER_2 (2:22)

That's when it happened.

Frances Haugen (2:24)

That's when I assumed they would. Well, they never caught me. Like we got all the way out the door before they ever realized like I had taken...

SPEAKER_2 (2:29)

Ever get close? Even the other girl that sat right across from you, she kind of had... Was that scene where she comes and she tells you, here's the chip? Did that ever happen? That never happened. That never happened. So that's just movie. Okay, got it. So were there other people involved internally trying to help?

Frances Haugen (2:46)

No, just Jeff.

SPEAKER_2 (2:47)

Just you?

Frances Haugen (2:47)

Yeah.

SPEAKER_2 (2:48)

And nobody... Did anybody... Like, you know, nowadays, with HR software, everybody wants to know sentiment. They want to know, you know, like almost a minority report to find out, we're about to lose Frances.

And based on email communication, she's probably 90 days away from quitting and she's hit tier one crisis mode for the company. Let's have a conversation with her. Did anybody approach you and say, you seem very unhappy?

Frances Haugen (3:10)

So I think I had that moment in my first six months at Facebook. So when I was working on ethnic violence, like more hands on, when I was working on people targeting Americans with these targeted misinformation campaigns, the level of seriousness that the company brought to it, I was very concerned that not enough was being done. Because remember, I am watching things like, I have friends who work on the ethnic violence team, and they're getting depression and having to talk about going on medical leave. Like it's that bad, right? People are feeling suicidal because like the company is, like the reality you learn inside the company versus like what you can do. The gap is so big, right? During that period of time, that's when I kind of clued in that it was unacceptable to be unhappy inside the company. Right? Like they made it very clear that like you were not allowed to be negative. And so after about six months in, I realized, oh, if I want to continue working on Facebook, and that's like around when COVID hit, and I was like, oh, I don't want to lose my job.