44 Time December 6/December 13, 2021
(Facebook denies that it dissolved the
team, saying instead that members were
spread out across the company to am-
plify its influence.) Haugen and many
of her former colleagues felt betrayed.
But her mother’s counsel had men-
tally prepared her. “It meant that when
that moment happened, I was actually
in a pretty good place,” Haugen says.
“I wasn’t in a place of crisis like many
whistle -blowers are.”
In March, Haugen moved to Puerto
Rico, in part for the warm weather,
which she says helps with her neuropa-
thy pain. Another factor was the island’s
cryptocurrency community, which has
burgeoned because of the U.S. territo-
ry’s lack of capital gains taxes. In Octo-
ber, she told the New York Times that
she had bought into crypto “at the right
time,” implying that she had a financial
buffer that allowed her to whistle-blow
comfortably.
Haugen’s detractors have pointed to
the irony of her calling for tech compa-
nies to do their social duty, while living
in a U.S. territory with a high rate of pov-
erty that is increasingly being used as a
tax haven. Some have also pointed out
that Haugen is not entirely independent:
she has received support from Luminate,
a philanthropic organization pushing for
progressive Big Tech reform in Europe
and the U.S., and which is backed by
the billionaire founder of eBay, Pierre
Omidyar. Luminate paid Haugen’s ex-
penses on her trip to Europe and helped
organize meetings with senior officials.
Omidyar has also donated to Whistle-
blower Aid, the nonprofit legal organi-
zation that is now representing Haugen
pro bono. Luminate says it entered into
a relationship with Haugen only after
she went public with her disclosures.
Haugen resigned from Facebook in
May this year, after being told by the
human- resources team that she could
not work remotely from a U.S. terri-
tory. The news accelerated the secret
project that she had decided to begin
after seeing her old team disbanded. To
collect the documents she would later
disclose, Haugen trawled Facebook’s in-
ternal employee forum, Workplace. She
traced the careers of integrity colleagues
she admired—many of whom had left
the company in frustration—gathering
slide decks, research briefs and policy
proposals they had worked on, as well as
other documents she came across.
While collecting the documents, she
had flashbacks to her teenage years pre-
paring folders of evidence for debates.
“I was like, Wow, this is just like debate
camp!” she recalls. “When I was 16 and
doing that, I had no idea that it would be
useful in this way in the future.”In her Senate teStImony in early
October, Haugen suggested a federal
agency should be set up to oversee social
media algorithms so that “someone like
me could do a tour of duty” after work-
ing at a company like Facebook. But
moving to Washington, D.C., to serve at
such an agency has no appeal, she says.
“I am happy to be one of the people con-
sulted by that agency,” she says. “But I
have a life I really like in Puerto Rico.”
Now that her tour of Europe is over,
Haugen has had a chance to think about
what comes next. Over an encrypted
phone call from Puerto Rico a few days
after we met in Paris, she says she would
like to help build a grassroots movement
to help young people push back against
the harms caused by social media com-
panies. In this new task, as seems to be
the case with everything in Haugen’s life,
she wants to try to leverage the power
of education. “I am fully aware that a
19-year-old talking to a 16-year-old will
be more effective than me talking to that
16-year-old,” she tells me. “There is a
real opportunity for young people to
flex their political muscles and demand
accountability.”
I ask if she has a message to send to
young people reading this. “Hmm,” she
says, followed by a long pause. “In every
era, humans invent technologies that
run away from themselves,” she says.
“It’s very easy to look at some of these
tech platforms and feel like they are toobig, too abstract and too amorphous to
influence in any way. But the reality is
there are lots of things we can do. And
the reason they haven’t done them is be-
cause it makes the companies less prof-
itable. Not unprofitable, just less profit-
able. And no company has the right to
subsidize their profits with your health.”
Ironically, Haugen gives partial
credit to one of her managers at Face-
book for inspiring her thought pro-
cess around blowing the whistle. After
struggling with a problem for a week
without asking for help, she missed
a deadline. When she explained why,
the manager told her he was disap-
pointed that she had hidden that she
was having difficulty, she says. “He
said, ‘We solve problems together;
we don’t solve them alone,’ ” she says.
Never one to miss a teaching oppor-
tunity, she continues, “Part of why I
came forward is I believe Facebook has
been struggling alone. They’ve been
hiding how much they’re struggling.
And the reality is, we solve problems
together, we don’t solve them alone.”
It’s a philosophy that Haugen sees as
the basis for how social media platforms
should deal with societal issues going
forward. In late October, Facebook Inc.
(which owns Facebook, Whats App and
Insta gram) changed its name to Meta,
a nod to its ambition to build the next
generation of online experiences. In a
late-October speech, CEO Mark Zucker-
berg said he believed the “Metaverse ”—
its new proposal to build a virtual
universe —would fundamentally re-
shape how humans interact with tech-
nology. Haugen says she is concerned
the Metaverse will isolate people rather
than bring them together: “I believe any
tech with that much influence deserves
public oversight.”
But hers is also a belief system that
allows for a path toward redemption.
That friend she lost to misinformation?
His story has a happy ending. “I learned
later that he met a nice girl and he had
gone back to church,” Haugen says,
adding that he no longer believes
in conspiracy theories. “It gives me
a lot of hope that we can recover as
individuals and as a society. But it
involves us connecting with people.”
— With reporting by LesLie DicksTein
and nik PoPLi