Tech

Facebook “is tearing our societies apart, ” whistleblower says in interview

Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen's <em>60 Minutes</em> interview aired on October 3, 2021.

Enlarge / Fb whistleblower Frances Haugen’s 60 Minutes job interview aired on October 3, 2021. (credit: 60 Minutes / CBS)

The Facebook whistleblower revealed her identity last night along with the girl plans to reform the embattled social media company from the outside. Frances Haugen , a data scientist by training and a veteran of Google and Pinterest, had been recruited to Myspace in 2018 to help the platform prepare for election interference. When she quit in May, she took with her a cache of tens of thousands of documents that now underpin the sweeping congressional investigation into Facebook’s practices.

But Haugen’s turning point came months earlier, on December 2, 2020, less than a month after the presidential election, when the company disbanded the Civic Integrity team she worked on.

“They told us, ‘We’re dissolving Civic Integrity. ’ Like, they basically said, ‘Oh good, we made it through the election. There wasn’t riots. We can get rid associated with Civic Integrity now. ’ Fast forward a couple months, we got the particular insurrection, ” Haugen told CBS’s 60 Minutes , referring to typically the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol. “And when they got rid of Civic Integrity, it was this moment where I was like, ‘I don’t trust that they’re willing to actually invest what needs to be invested to keep Facebook from being dangerous. ’”

Read 16 remaining paragraphs | Comments