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arrival, the younger Haugen settled
into lockdown life with her parents,
continuing her work for Facebook re-
motely. “We shared meals, and every
day we would have conversations,” Alice
says. She recalled her daughter voicing
specific concerns about Facebook’s im-
pact in Ethiopia, where ethnic violence
was playing out on—and in some cases
being amplified by—Facebook’s plat-
forms. On Nov. 9, Facebook said it had
been investing in safety measures in
Ethiopia for more than two years, in-
cluding activating algorithms to down-
rank potentially inflammatory content
in several languages in response to esca-
lating violence there. Haugen acknowl-
edges the work, saying she wants to give
“credit where credit is due,” but claims
the social network was too late to inter-
vene with safety measures in Ethiopia
and other parts of the world. “The idea
that they don’t even turn those knobs
on until people are getting shot is com-
pletely unacceptable,” she says. “The re-
ality right now is that Facebook is not
willing to invest the level of resources
that would allow it to intervene sooner.”
A Facebook spokesperson defended
the prioritization system in its state-
ment, saying that the company has long-
term strategies to “mitigate the impacts
of harmful offline events in the countries
we deem most at risk... while still pro-
tecting freedom of expression and other
human rights principles.”
What Haugen saw was happening in
nations like Ethiopia and India would
clarify her opinions about “engagement-
based ranking”—the system within
Facebook more commonly known as
“the algorithm”—that chooses which
posts, out of thousands of options, to
rank at the top of users’ feeds. Haugen’s
central argument is that human nature
means this system is doomed to am-
plify the worst in us. “One of the things
that has been well documented in psy-
chology research is that the more times
a human is exposed to something, the
more they like it, and the more they be-
lieve it’s true,” she says. “One of the most
dangerous things about engagement-
based ranking is that it is much easier
to inspire someone to hate than it is to
compassion or empathy. Given that you
have a system that hyper amplifies the
most extreme content, you’re going to
see people who get exposed over and
over again to the idea that [for exam-
ple] it’s O.K. to be violent to Muslims.
And that destabilizes societies.”
In the run-up to the 2020 U.S. elec-
tion, according to media reports, some
initiatives proposed by Facebook’s
integrity teams to tackle misinformation
and other problems were killed or wa-
tered down by executives on the policy
side of the company, who are responsi-
ble both for setting the platform’s rules
and lobbying governments on Face-
book’s behalf. Facebook spokespeople
have said in response that the interven-
tions were part of the company’s com-
mitment to nuanced policymaking that
balanced freedom of speech with safety.
Haugen’s time at business school taught
her to view the problem differently:
Facebook was a company that priori-
tized growth over the safety of its users.
“Organizational structure is a wonky
topic, but it matters,” Haugen says. In-
side the company, she says, she observed
the effect of these repeated interven-
tions on the integrity team. “People
make decisions on what projects to work
on, or advance, or give more resources
to, based on what they believe is the
chance for success,” she says. “I think
there were many projects that could be
content-neutral—that didn’t involve us
choosing what are good or bad ideas, but
instead are about making the platform
safe—that never got greenlit, because if
you’ve seen other things like that fail,
you don’t even try them.”
Being with her parents, particularly
her mother, who left a career as a pro-
fessor to become an Episcopal priest,
helped Haugen become comfortable
with the idea she might one day have to
go public. “I was learning all these hor-
rific things about Facebook, and it was
really tearing me up inside,” she says.
“The thing that really hurts most whis-
tle-blowers is: whistle-blowers live with
secrets that impact the lives of other
people. And they feel like they have no
way of resolving them. And so instead
of being destroyed by learning these
things, I got to talk to my mother...
If you’re having a crisis of conscience,
where you’re trying to figure out a path
that you can live with, having someone
you can agonize to, over and over again,
is the ultimate amenity.”
Haugen didn’t decide to blow the
whistle until December 2020, by which
point she was back in San Francisco.
The final straw came when Facebook
dissolved Haugen’s former team, civic
integrity, whose leader had asked em-
ployees to take an oath to put the public
good before Facebook’s private interest.
△
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg
recently announced the company was
rebranding as Meta
HAUGEN: JABIN BOTSFORD—POOL/GETTY IMAGES; ZUCKERBERG: META/EPA-EFE/SHUTTERSTOCK
