The woman who stood up to Facebook

Frances Haugen has been hailed as a hero after exposing the social network’s harmful practices. Can her testimony force it to change?

- Dan Milmo

The journey from disillusioned ex-employee to modern-day heroine took Frances Haugen less than five months. The 37-year-old logged out of Facebook’s company network for the last time in May and last week was being publicly lauded a “ 21st-century American hero ” on Washington’s Capitol Hill.

That journey was paved with tens of thousands of documents, taken from Facebook’s internal system by Haugen, that formed the backbone of a series of damning revelations first published in the Wall Street Journal last month. They revealed that Facebook knew its products were damaging the mental health of teenage girls, resisted changes that would make the content of its main platform less divisive and knew its main platform was being used to incite ethnic violence in Ethiopia.

The ensuing public backlash tipped Facebook into its biggest crisis since the Cambridge Analytica scandal of 2018 and culminated in damning testimony by Haugen in front of US senators last Tuesday. Her opening words were delivered against an excruciating backdrop for Facebook: only hours earlier all its services – including its eponymous platform, the Instagram photo and video sharing app and the WhatsApp messaging service – went offline for six hours due to a maintenance error that affected the company’s 2.8 billion daily users. Facebook’s services then suffered more glitches last Friday.