Frances Haugen blew the whistle on Meta’s alleged harms done to young people’s mental health in 2021. Five years later, her former employer has suffered two major legal losses due to the way they treat children on their platforms.
Her message to Meta, parent company of Facebook and Instagram: “The reality is you can run from consequences for a very long time, but you can’t run forever.”
In Los Angeles last month, a jury ordered Meta to pay a 20-year-old young woman who claimed Instagram harmed her mental health $4.2 million in compensatory damages.
In New Mexico that same week, AG Raul Torrez ordered them to pay $375 million on behalf of children who interacted with predators on their platforms.
“[People] look at how big these companies are, and it feels like it’s impossible for any individual or any small group of people to do anything,” Haugen told The Post in an interview. However, that has now been proven untrue. She says the rulings give her “a lot of faith in humanity.”
The 42-year-old has worked for Google, Pinterest, and Yelp. She was recruited by Facebook as a product manager in 2019 then came forward as a whistleblower in 2021 with the “Facebook Files,” revealing Meta acknowledged their platforms caused harms to young users in internal documents.
“I came forward because I knew that I didn’t really have a choice,” she recalled. “I had become complicit in a system that I was sincerely worried was going to harm millions of people around the world.”
In the wake of these major rulings — both of which were considered bellwethers for whether or not similar legal theories would prevail — she anticipates that social media platforms will be far more proactive about preventing harm, particularly to minors.
“I think Meta has kind of taken the assumption that they don’t have to act, and these court cases are the first repudiation that, no, there are costs of not acting too,” Haugen, who lives in Puerto Rico, said.
“Companies are going to have to sit down and assess: are we actually investing in a reasonable amount in responding to safety issues?”
Haugen was fascinated by Zuckerberg’s testimony at Los Angeles Superior Court. “We don’t very often get to see these kinds of unfiltered things because he mostly does these puff pieces or these very safe space interviews on podcasts,” Haugen said.
The Meta CEO told a jury in February that beauty filters, which many say simulate plastic surgery, were “free expression” and that keeping kids under the age of 13 off Instagram was “very difficult.”
Many considered his comments dismissive. This attitude, Haugen thinks, is evidence of Zuckerberg’s strange professional career, which started when he launched Facebook aged just 19, in 2004.
“I think he’s someone who didn’t get to grow up. He was isolated all his 20s and 30s,” Haugen said. “It really shows that he’s been living in a bubble since he was 19 years old, more than half his life now, where the only opinion that actually mattered was his.”
Meta did not return The Post’s request for comment. Ex-employee Haugen claims that for too long Zuckerberg has been surrounded by encouraging advisers.
“One of the things that dooms a lot of companies is favoritism,” she argued. “Mark has not had to be around anyone he didn’t want to be around for years. All the executives who actually get to interact with him are hand chosen… and these are the people who know how to make him not feel uncomfortable.”
Even though Haugen blew the whistle on Big Tech, she hasn’t lost hope that it can ultimately be a force for good.
But the algorithmic product specialist says that will depend on whether we re-evaluate our relationship to algorithms altogether.
“When we give up our own agency to direct these systems and make an algorithm that is making our decisions for us, that algorithm is inherently reductive,” she said. “The question is: do we want our attention directed by people or by machines?”
