Whistleblower Frances Haugen on Facebook's 'Social Reckoning'

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Transgender and non-binary kids are often talked about in the news, but we rarely hear what these young people have to say for themselves.

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Hey, it's Sasha Coka, and on the California Report magazine, we featured the voices of trans kids and the people in their lives who love and support them in an award-winning series called Love You for You. You can find those episodes by looking for the California Report magazine wherever you get your podcasts.

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Mina Kim (1:25)

Welcome to Forum, I'm Mina Kim.

Aaron Sorkin's follow up to the 2010 film, The Social Network, about the founding of Facebook, comes out next week, called The Social Reckoning. This time, it's about the 2021 revelations that Facebook knew its platform, stoked division and harmed kids, especially teen girls, and did not act. Revelations that came to light after Frances Haugen decided to secretly leak thousands of internal documents to Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz. Here's a bit of the film's trailer.

SPEAKER_1 (1:56)

Listen, before I go on, I want to make something clear.

SPEAKER_5 (1:59)

Okay.

SPEAKER_1 (2:00)

I have a hunch you're not a fan of Facebook.

SPEAKER_7 (2:02)

But I am.

SPEAKER_1 (2:04)

I am here to help Facebook, not hurt it, okay?

SPEAKER_8 (2:07)

You sent me a message.

SPEAKER_5 (2:09)

Who would you like to talk about? I don't know what the girl thinks she's doing.

SPEAKER_7 (2:17)

She's disrupting.

Mina Kim (2:22)

Haugen's memoir, The Power of One, How I Found the Strength to Tell the Truth and Why I Blew the Whistle on Facebook, is out in paperback this month, and she joins me now. Welcome to Forum, Frances.

Frances Haugen (2:35)

Thank you for inviting me.

Mina Kim (2:37)

What did you think of the film? I assume you got a preview.

Frances Haugen (2:41)

I did get to see it maybe two weeks ago, and I was really impressed because ever since conversations have begun on should they make a movie out of this, I've always been a little baffled, like how do you make exciting taking a bunch of pictures? Aaron Sorkin worked his magic, and it's exciting and funny and all things that you associate with an Aaron Sorkin movie.

So, it was real surreal, and it's so odd seeing yourself up on the big screen, I'll put it that way.

Mina Kim (3:13)

Yeah, I was going to say, it must be surreal, how?

Frances Haugen (3:18)

It's one of these things.

So, there are parts of my experience where I don't ruminate on what happened five years ago. I have a wonderful life that is not related to social media. And there are parts of it that he depicted really well that I, once I watched them, I was like, oh yeah, I did write about that. That did happen. So, I'll give you an example. You know, there were things that I had high levels of certainty about when I first started talking to Jeff. And there were things that I didn't know, but I knew there were known unknowns when I started talking to Jeff. And they did a really good job of capturing that, like there was a period of time where we were trying to fit the puzzle pieces together.

And I think it's an important thing to remind people that these topics aren't just complicated for like everyday people. They're complicated for people who know a lot about them. And they did a great job of depicting that quest for understanding.

Mina Kim (4:15)

Yeah, they had Mikey Madison play you, the Oscar winner, and then Jeremy Allen White plays Jeff Horowitz. Did she get some of the details right, or things that were, you had actually forgotten?

Frances Haugen (4:29)

Yeah, I was saying some of those things about the process of like, how did we create, I'll say create meaning, right? Like it's one thing to have a giant stack of paper, and it's another thing to be like, why did this happen? What were all the dominoes that like, because it's very easy to tell a story about someone who's evil, right? It's like, oh, well, they did bad things because they wanted to hurt other people. That almost never is the real story.