40 Time December 6/December 13, 2021
Frances Haugen is in THe back oF
a Paris taxi, waving a piece of sushi in
the air.
The cab is on the way to a Hilton
hotel, where this November afternoon
she is due to meet with the French digi-
tal economy minister. The Eiffel Tower
appears briefly through the window,
piercing a late-fall haze. Haugen is wolf-
ing down lunch on the go, while recall-
ing an episode from her childhood. The
teacher of her gifted and talented class
used to play a game where she would
read to the other children the first let-
ter of a word from the dictionary and its
definition. Haugen and her classmates
would compete, in teams, to guess the
word. “At some point, my classmates
convinced the teacher that it was un-
fair to put me on either team, because
whichever team had me was going to
win and so I should have to compete
against the whole class,” she says.
Did she win? “I did win,” she says
with a level of satisfaction that quickly
fades to indignation. “And so imagine!
That makes kids hate you!” She pops an
edamame into her mouth with a flour-
ish. “I look back and I’m like, That was
a bad idea.”
She tells the story not to draw atten-
tion to her precociousness—although
it does do that—but to share the les-
son it taught her. “This shows you how
badly some educators understand psy-
chology,” she says. While some have de-
scribed the Facebook whistle-blower as
an activist, Haugen says she sees herself
as an educator. To her mind, an impor-
tant part of her mission is driving home
a message in a way that resonates with
people, a skill she has spent years honing.
It is the penultimate day of a gru-
eling three-week tour of Europe, dur-
ing which Haugen has cast herself in
the role of educator in front of the U.K.
and E.U. Parliaments, regulators and
one tech conference crowd. Haugen
says she wanted to cross the Atlantic to
offer her advice to lawmakers putting
the final touches on new regulations that
take aim at the outsize influence of large
social media companies.
The new U.K. and E.U. laws have the
potential to force Facebook and its com-
petitors to open up their algorithms to
public scrutiny, and face large fines if
they fail to address problematic impacts
of their platforms. European lawmak-
ers and regulators “have been on this
journey a little longer” than their U.S.
counterparts, Haugen says diplomati-
cally. “My goal was to support lawmak-
ers as they think through these issues.”
Beginning in late summer, Haugen,
37, disclosed tens of thousands of pages
of internal Facebook documents to Con-
gress and the Securities and Exchange
Commission (SEC). The documents
were the basis of a series of articles in the
Wall Street Journal that sparked a reck-
oning in September over what the com-
pany knew about how it contributed to
harms ranging from its impact on teens’
mental health and the extent of misin-
formation on its platforms, to human
traffickers’ open use of its services. The
documents paint a picture of a company
that is often aware of the harms to which
it contributes—but is either unwilling
or unable to act against them. Hau-
gen’s disclosures set Facebook stock
on a downward trajectory, formed the
basis for eight new whistle-blower com-
plaints to the SEC and have prompted
lawmakers around the world to intensify
their calls for regulation of the company.
Facebook has rejected Haugen’s
claims that it puts profits before safety,
and says it spends $5 billion per year on
keeping its platforms safe. “As a com-
pany, we have every commercial and
moral incentive to give the maximum
number of people as much of a positive
experience as possible on our apps,” a
spokesperson said in a statement.
Although many insiders have blownthe whistle on Facebook before, nobody
has left the company with the breadth
of material that Haugen shared. And
among legions of critics in politics, ac-
ademia and media, no single person has
been as effective as Haugen in bringing
public attention to Facebook’s negative
impacts. When Haugen decided to blow
the whistle against Facebook late last
year, the company employed more than
58,000 people. Many had access to the
documents that she would eventually
pass to authorities. Why did it take so
long for somebody to do what she did?
One answer is that blowing the whis-
tle against a multibillion-dollar tech
company requires a particular combi-
nation of skills, personality traits and
circumstances. In Haugen’s case, it took
one near-death experience, a lost friend,
several crushed hopes, a crypto currency
bet that came good and months in coun-
sel with a priest who also happens to be
her mother. Haugen’s atypical person-
ality, glittering academic background,
strong moral convictions, robust sup-
port networks and self- confidence also
helped. Hers is the story of how all these
factors came together—some by chance,
some by design—to create a watershed
moment in corporate responsibility,
human communication and democracy.When debate coach Scott Wunn first
met a 16-year-old Haugen at Iowa City
West High School, she had already been
on the team for two years, after finishing
junior high a year early. He was an En-
glish teacher who had been headhunted
to be the debate team’s new coach. The
school took this kind of extracurricular
activity seriously, and so did the young
girl with the blond hair. In their first ex-
change, Wunn remembers Haugen grill-
ing him about whether he would take
coaching as seriously as his other duties.
“I could tell from that moment she
was very serious about debate,” says
Wunn, who is now the executive director
of the National Speech and Debate Asso-
ciation. “When we ran tournaments, she
was the student who stayed the latest,
who made sure that all of the students
on the team were organized. Everything
that you can imagine, Frances would do.”
Haugen specialized in a form of de-
bate that specifically asked students to
weigh the morality of every issue, and