The Social Reckoning: Frances Haugen On What Facebook Knew & Why She Came Forward

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Frances Haugen (1:21)

Facebook was so much worse than I had any idea it could be.

Rich Roll (1:26)

In 2023, Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen joined me on this podcast for an illuminating conversation about the role Facebook, as well as algorithmically driven social media platforms generally, have played in degrading mental health and accelerating social divisiveness.

That episode was extremely popular, nearing a million views on YouTube alone. And now, Haugen's story is the subject of The Social Reckoning. My name is Frances Haugen.

Frances Haugen (1:55)

I used to work for Facebook.

Rich Roll (1:57)

Just released major motion picture written and directed by Aaron Sorkin, the screenwriter behind many amazing films and television shows, including The West Wing and The Social Network. This movie's predecessor and personally one of my favorite films of all time.

I have plenty of thoughts about Sorkin's rendering of Haugen's story to the big screen. Mainly that it's fairly stagnant and so the film isn't exactly revelatory in my opinion. Nonetheless, Sorkin does provide a workman like version of what went down at Facebook between 2019 and 2021 to elicit the role that Facebook played integrating mental health, amplifying misinformation and radicalizing millions of Americans, as well as the role that Haugen and Jeff Horowitz at the Wall Street Journal played in bringing these facts to light.

Frances Haugen (2:47)

The company's leadership knows how to make Facebook and Instagram saver, but won't make the necessary changes because they have put their astronomical profits before people.

Rich Roll (2:57)

Apropos to The Social Reckoning returning this discourse to the center of the frame, it felt worthwhile to myself re-engage with this discourse by re-sharing the majority of my 2023 conversation with Frances Haugen, as well as excerpts from my conversations with Jonathan Haidt from 2024, Max Fisher from 2022, and former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy from 2025, all of which are on this very subject of social media and the impact that it is having on all of us. Because the ill of our algorithmically driven information interfaces have only grown worse.

Well, let's walk through the history of this a little bit for people that aren't super familiar with your arc, and begin with why you even joined Facebook to begin with. Like what was attractive about going to work at Facebook? Because at the time, it wasn't that long ago, it was 2019, right? There was already a lot of stuff, alarming things about Facebook at the time, that for the sort of uneducated person about your life would make one think like, well, why did she even go there?

Frances Haugen (4:22)

So back in my late 20s, early 30s, so I went into the hospital in 2014 So I was 29 years old and my health had been declining for a couple of years. So I went from being able to ride 125 miles on a bike in a day to being in a wheelchair in two and a half years. And so I hired an assistant who was a friend of my younger brothers and he became essential to my recovery. And in 2016, Bernie Sanders lost the primary.

And my friend, he kind of fell into the dark corners of the Internet. He began to have a lot of conspiratorial thinking. And I remember how painful it was. When the Facebook recruiter reached out to me in late 2018, early 2019 and was like, hey, do you want to work at Facebook? I said the only thing I would work on is misinformation.