PortraitFrom Google to Facebook via Pinterest and Yelp: Frances Haugen embodies a new generation of pure Silicon Valley products who, sensitive to ethical and societal issues, no longer hesitate to challenge their employers’ faults.
When, in June 2019, Frances Haugen pushes the doors of Facebook’s headquarters for the first time, she oscillates between hope and pride, impressed by the size of the buildings, which make like a small town in the middle of Silicon Valley.
She hesitated for a long time, but finally accepted a position to work on disinformation related to politics and society. It all started with the drift of one of her closest friends who, she said, “Radicalized” on the Internet. The one she considered a little brother, and whom she had hired to help her when she was confined in a wheelchair by an autoimmune disease in 2014, has moved away as he damaged himself. in disinformation and online conspiracy. When she arrived at Facebook, she decided to tackle this problem. “I don’t wish anyone the pain I felt”, she told the Wall Street Journal.
Two years later, Frances Haugen did not solve the problem from the inside, and therefore changed her strategy. By leaking thousands of internal Facebook documents to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the US Congress and journalists around the world, the former model employee plunged the social network into turmoil. Accusing it of not sufficiently controlling the harmful effects of its algorithms in terms of hatred or disinformation, it now connects interviews on television sets and parliamentary hearings. After a stint in the British Parliament and a few days in Germany, she was to be heard on Monday, November 8, at the European Parliament, before going to France on Wednesday, at the National Assembly and the Senate.
Also listen “Facebook Files”: in the disordered cogs of the company
From Google to Facebook, via Pinterest and Yelp, Frances Haugen embodies a new generation of pure Silicon Valley products who, driven by ethical and societal issues, no longer hesitate to challenge the faults of their employers.
The “Facebook Files”, a dive into the workings of the “likes” machine
The “Facebook Files” are several hundred internal Facebook documents copied by Frances Haugen, a specialist in algorithms, when she was an employee of the social network. They were provided to the US regulator and Congress, then transmitted by a US parliamentary source to several media, redacted from the personal information of Facebook employees. In Europe, these media are, besides The world, the German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung, the WDR and NDR television channels, the Tamedia Group, Knack, Berlingske and OCCRP.
They show that Facebook is devoting more resources to limiting its damaging effects in the West, to the detriment of the rest of the world. They attest that these effects are known internally but the warning signs are not always taken into account. Finally, they prove that Facebook’s algorithms have become so complex that they sometimes seem to escape their own authors. Find all our articles by clicking here.
A smooth journey
Before spending her entire working life in California, Frances Haugen was born in Iowa, an agricultural state in the central United States. Both her parents are scientists at the local university and she has a happy childhood in a “House full of books”. In a local newspaper in 1997, she explained that she hesitated between a career as a biologist, a lawyer and even ” political woman “.
In 2007, “Newsweek” mentions a 23-year-old employee wooed by aspirants for the Democratic nomination: Frances Haugen
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