Thousands of documents uncovered by Frances Haugen reveal, among other things, how employees of Facebook—or Meta, as it’s now known—talk when they think that no one is listening.
In the past few weeks, you may have noticed that your news sources—the papers you read, the broadcasts you watch, and, let’s be honest, the social-media feeds you constantly, furtively refresh—have been even more replete than usual with stories about how Facebook is bad for the world. You’re not imagining things. It’s not a conspiracy. It’s a “consortium.” In mid-September, under the rubric “The Facebook Files,” the Wall Street Journal began running a series of blockbuster articles based on thousands of internal Facebook documents that a whistle-blower had leaked to the Journal, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and members of Congress. One of the articles cited Facebook’s own unpublished research to suggest that “Instagram is toxic for teenage girls”; another showed how, even as Mark Zuckerberg pledged to use Facebook to amplify “authoritative Covid-19 information,” such posts were trailed by “cesspools of anti-vaccine comments.” In early October, in an interview with “60 Minutes,” the whistle-blower identified herself as Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee who now lives in Puerto Rico (and who, we later learned, had struck it rich, or at least comfortable, by investing early in crypto). Two days later, she testified before a Senate subcommittee—one of the rare congressional hearings to get significant pickup beyond C-span. Still, according to the tech-news site the Information, “Haugen felt there were more stories to be told.” So she arranged for the same set of documents to be leaked to a new set of journalists—reporters from “more than a dozen news organizations as diverse as the Associated Press, CNN, Le Monde, Reuters and the Fox Business network”—who then formed an “unusual reporting consortium.”..
