The inside story of one woman’s quest to bring transparency and accountability to Big Tech, by the Facebook whistleblower who is determined to help us all retake control of our lives.
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Frances Haugen is an American data engineer and scientist, and whistleblower. A graduate of the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering and Harvard Business School, she worked at Google, Yelp, and Pinterest before joining Facebook in 2019 and working in its civic integrity department. In the spring of 2021, she disclosed tens of thousands of internal documents to the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Wall Street Journal, revealing Facebook’s awareness and complicity in radicalization and political violence around the world..
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Brian Merchant is the bestselling author of The One Device. His work has appeared in WIRED, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Harper’s, The Guardian, and beyond. He is the founder of Terraform, VICE Media’s speculative fiction publication, and Automaton, a special project examining AI and automation at Gizmodo. He lives in Los Angeles and is currently a writer for the Los Angeles Times. His newest book, BLOOD IN THE MACHINE: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech, is on sale September 5, 2023.
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In 2021, when news outlets feasted on “the Facebook Files,” Frances Haugen went public as the former employee who blew the whistle on the company by copying tens of thousands of pages of documents. She testified to Congress and spoke to the media. She was hailed at President Biden’s first State of the Union Address. She made sure everyone understood exactly what the documents revealed: Facebook knew it had accidentally changed its algorithm to reward extremism and refused to fix it; it knew that its customers were using the platform to foment violence, to spread falsehoods, to diminish the self-esteem of young women, and more. But how was it that Haugen was the only employee at the company who dared to step forward?
 
Her story is an inspiring tale of one young woman’s life and the choices she made. From an isolated childhood in Iowa to an unaccredited college, to one among the few women at Google in its heyday, Frances Haugen learned how to focus on what mattered, and to ignore her critics. To harness the strength of standing in the truth.