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.
この記事は The Guardian Weekly の October 15, 2021 版に掲載されています。
7 日間の Magzter GOLD 無料トライアルを開始して、何千もの厳選されたプレミアム ストーリー、9,000 以上の雑誌や新聞にアクセスしてください。
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この記事は The Guardian Weekly の October 15, 2021 版に掲載されています。
7 日間の Magzter GOLD 無料トライアルを開始して、何千もの厳選されたプレミアム ストーリー、9,000 以上の雑誌や新聞にアクセスしてください。
すでに購読者です? サインイン
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