Tech

Whistleblower Frances Haugen still believes in Silicon Valley


In your post-Google and pre-Facebook jobs, have your views on tech companies deteriorated?

I still feel very positive about most of the tech companies in Silicon Valley. I don’t think there is an inherent rot or something like that. I believe there should be transparency between any power, any platform that has a lot of power. And then I think we need slightly different relationships with them.

By 2019, Facebook was scandalized and had very public defections. And yet you joined that tainted company.

I was approached by a recruiter in December 2018. I said the only thing I would do is misinform citizens. I think we need a lot more people working inside Facebook to fix Facebook’s problems. I highly recommend anyone working at Facebook.

Keep. Even after you unearth all that damn material, are you getting people to join Facebook?

People question whether you can be a person of integrity and work at Facebook. If anything, Facebook is a flat enough organization that if a lot of people go there determined to fix it, I think they’ll really have a positive impact.

Yet you left.

I did because I couldn’t stay longer and continue living in Puerto Rico [where I moved for health reasons]. I still live with excruciating pain every day, because I was paralyzed below the knee. Even going back to the Bay Area right now is extremely difficult for me because it’s cold and wet here, and it really hurts every day that I’m here. And so I had to choose between being in a place where I felt much more comfortable or working at Facebook.

Wait — if Facebook announced that you could work from Puerto Rico, would you still be working there? And none of this will happen?

At some point, I still have to go. At some point, you have to start the conversation. But I don’t think I’ll leave immediately.

So, after they said you couldn’t work from Puerto Rico, you made this important decision to bring those documents with you. Why do you feel it’s up to you to trigger this conversation?

I didn’t believe they could solve their problems alone. The reality of any organizational design is that if you really want change, you have to have a large pool of key people working to solve a problem. At Facebook, I’m on a team of about seven or eight product and program managers. Within six weeks, the entire group was gone. Most of them are from the original civic integrity. I don’t think I’m the only one who feels that Facebook has abandoned its mission or isn’t taking it seriously.

I’m not one to turn my back on someone in need. I volunteer at Burning Man as a ranger because I believe people change with help. I don’t believe that people change by being embarrassed. I knew Facebook had problems before I joined and I’ve lived with some of the personal consequences of it because I have an extremist friend. But when I arrived, I was just thinking about misinformation in the context of the United States. I never thought about it in the context of more fragile parts of the world. But even within two weeks of joining, I was like, “Oh my gosh, this is so much worse than I thought.” And so I think at some point in 2020, it’s starting to tell me how many lives are on the line.

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