Senators To Be Told Facebook ‘Putting Profit Before Safety'

A former Facebook employee who has accused the company of putting profit over safety will take her damning accusations to Washington today when she testifies to US senators.

- Dan Milmo Kari Paul

Frances Haugen, 37, was revealed on Sunday as the whistleblower behind a series of damaging reports in the Wall Street Journal that have heaped further political pressure on the social media company. Haugen told the news programme 60 Minutes that Facebook’s priority was making money over doing what was good for the public.

“The thing I saw at Facebook over and over again was there were conflicts of interest between what was good for the public and what was good for Facebook. And Facebook, over and over again, chose to optimize for its own interests, like making more money,” she said.

Haugen said the tens of thousands of documents she had collected and shared with the Wall Street Journal and US law enforcement showed the company was lying to the public when it claimed it was making significant progress against hatred, violence and misinformation.

“The version of Facebook that exists today is tearing our societies apart and causing ethnic violence around the world,” she said.

Haugen said she joined Facebook in 2019 as a product manager on its civic integrity team – which focused on issues related to elections worldwide – after spending more than a decade working in the tech industry, including at Pinterest and Google.