Frances Haugen summarizes the tens of thousands of internal Facebook documents that she released to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and The Wall Street Journal in 2021.1 These documents, called "The Facebook Files", describe how Facebook executives knowingly contributed to increasing political polarization and violence in many countries, including the genocide of Rohingyan Muslims in Myanmar and similar problems in many other countries because they did not know how to deliver the good quality services that make people's lives better while suppressing the negative effects -- and because doing otherwise would likely have reduced their profits. Facebook (and many other Internet companies) go to great lengths to screen out people who would intentionally do evil; Google famously says, "Don't do evil." She insists that the major problems attributed to social media (and other Internet companies) are more due to negligence than intent. 

She also suggests changes in social media policies that could improve the health and educational experiences of children while reducing the suicide rate. The Facebook Files document how Facebook executives have adopted polices to protect the public when failure to do so seemed likely to lead to legal mandates or losses of users but have often decided to cancel such policies or refuse to apply them in other countries when doing so would likely reduce their profit. 

She has supported the Digital Services Act adopted by the European Union but says it does not go far enough. She thinks academic and civil society researchers should have near total access to data held by Internet companies with appropriate privacy guarantees. This would allow concerned citizens and civil society organizations access to the information they need to document the need for better policies and lobby effectively for their adoption, enforced by appropriate legislation. 

Haugen compares the current situation with social media with that of automobile safety in 1965 when Ralph Nader published Unsafe at any speed, with a subtitle, The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile:2 At that time, there were 5.3 motor vehicle fatalities per 100 million vehicle miles traveled. Since 2007 this number has fluctuated between 1.08 and 1.37, roughly a fifth of what it was in 1965.3 Haugen attributes this in large part to how Nader's book helped groups like Mothers Against Drunk Driving lobby more effectively for reforms that mandated seat belts, collapsible steering columns, and air bags. Similar citizen activism, she insists, can lead to dramatic improvements in how social media impacts users and society more generally. However, they need access to data, which social media companies rarely provide to outsiders. 

More is available in her 2023 autobiography, The Power of One: How I Found the Strength to Tell the Truth and Why I Blew the Whistle on Facebook (Little, Brown and Company)

She is interviewed by Spencer Graves.

Copyright 2024, Frances Haugen, and Spencer Graves, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) 4.0 international license 

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Wikipedia, "Frances Haugen" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frances_Haugen), accessed 2024-08-12.

Wikipedia, "Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsafe_at_Any_Speed:_The_Designed-In_Dangers_of_the_American_Automobile).

Wikipedia, "Motor vehicle fatality rate in U.S. by year" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in_U.S._by_year).