01

02
03
CHAPTER 1 04
05
State of the Union 06
07
08
The exercise of power is determined by thousands of interactions 09
between the world of the powerful and that of the powerless, all the 10
more so because these worlds are never divided by a sharp line: 11
everyone has a small part of himself [or herself ] in both. 12
— ​Václav Havel, Disturbing the Peace 13
14
15
16
17
“
Don’t worry,” the boy said, looking up at me as we rode the elevator in the 18
United States Capitol. “I’ve been doing this for a while and even I get but‑ 19
terflies sometimes.” His words startled me out of my controlled breathing, 20
a calming exercise I’ve found helps center me when I feel anxious. From the 21
moment we had exited the White House and boarded the shuttle that 22
whisked us to the Capitol, I felt as if I had stepped onto a steadily building 23
escalator of anxiety and I didn’t know how to get off. It was March 1, 2022, 24
the evening of President Joe Biden’s first State of the Union Address. Only 25
five days before, Russia had invaded Ukraine. It occurred to me that the 26
speech would draw even more attention than usual, as people wondered 27
whether Biden might declare war on Russia. My heart was racing. 28
I glanced down at the boy, Joshua Davis. He wore a dapper dark blue 29
suit, s­ apphire-​blue tie, his blond hair parted on the side. The bespectacled 30
thirteen-​year-​old emanated the poise of a seasoned ambassador. Which, in 31
a way, he was. Diagnosed with diabetes as a baby, by the time Joshua was 32
in kindergarten he had become something of a national spokesman on 33
behalf of people with the disease. He had most recently been calling on the S34
drug companies to make insulin affordable to all who needed it. Joshua N35

PowerOfOne_HCtext1P.indd 1 3/3/23 9:52:18 AM
 F R A NC E S H AUGE N

01 was clearly comfortable at the center of attention, and he was clearly per‑
02 ceptive, as he could see that I most definitely was not at ease.
03 I had entered what became a spotlight just six months earlier, blowing
04 the whistle on Facebook in a very public way, and testifying to Congress
05 and elsewhere about the many routes by which the platform had become a
06 source of misinformation and a spark plug for political violence. The com‑
07 pany knew it was happening, but they prioritized profits over public safety.
08 The irony was not lost on me that I was now being reassured by a
09 junior high student one third my age. I had a flash of a thought of how dif‑
10 ferent we were: Joshua had spoken before the Virginia General Assembly at
11 the age of four, urging them to pass a bill making schools safer for kids
12 with Type 1 diabetes. When I was four years old, I was building wooden
13 boxes only a mother could love, with real saws and hammers at my Montes‑
14 sori preschool. Up until six months before, when I revealed my identity on
15 60 Minutes, I had spent my entire life avoiding the spotlight, to the point of
16 having eloped to a Zanzibarian beach for my first marriage. In the fifteen-​
17 plus years since college, I’ve had maybe two birthday parties. My mind is
18 wired to think in terms of data and spreadsheets, and according to my
19 rough estimate, Joshua had been in the public eye for 70 percent of his life
20 whereas I had only been in the spotlight for less than 1.5 percent of mine.
21 We were among a handful of people that night who had been invited as
22 guests of the First Lady. Being invited to sit in the First Lady’s box meant
23 the president of the United States would cite each of us in his address,
24 humanizing symbols of his agenda. I had been invited because I was “the
25 Facebook whistleblower.” I had extracted 22,000 pages of documents from
26 inside the social media company where I had worked on the Civic Misin‑
27 formation team and then with Counter-​Espionage. I not only worked to
28 ensure that all of the technical and terrible facts in those documents made
29 it into the public sphere, but by the time of the State of the Union, I had
30 spent months on the road to make sure the public understood what they
31 really meant.
32 I had made it through my public appearances thus far, including a
33 debut on 60 Minutes and testifying to a string of congressional and parlia‑
34S mentary committees around the world, by focusing on the presentation of
35N the substance of the documents. I clung to an anxiety-​relieving conceit that

PowerOfOne_HCtext1P.indd 2 3/3/23 9:52:18 AM
 T H E P OW ER OF ON E

I was, as a friend coached me, “just a conduit for the documents.” My pur‑ 01
pose was to provide clarity and context; my physical presence was inciden‑ 02
tal to that. It wasn’t about me, it was about the information the world 03
needed to know. This State of the Union, though, felt different. For this 04
appearance, my purpose more or less, was just to be there. To be looked at. 05
When the president of the United States gave me my cue, I was to stand 06
before the nation, before the world, and just be seen. 07
Shorn of my protective mantra, my heart was racing. “Thank you, 08
you’re so kind,” I said to Joshua as we emerged into the marble-​lined corri‑ 09
dors of the Capitol and headed toward the balcony of the House of Repre‑ 10
sentatives Chamber. 11
I had begun this journey the year before, when I submitted what I 12
believed to be documents of immediate and immense public interest to the 13
Securities and Exchange Commission as part of a whistleblower complaint. 14
In my complaint, I detailed the myriad ways Facebook had, over and over 15
again, misled — ​over and over again failed to warn the public about issues 16
as diverse and as dire as national and international security threats, the 17
Facebook algorithms that drive political party platforms, and the fact that 18
Facebook had knowingly been harming the health and well-​being of chil‑ 19
dren as young as ten years old — ​all for the sake of profit. The complaint, 20
rooted in the documentary evidence, made clear that Facebook was endan‑ 21
gering the world and that the company was stuck in a downward feedback 22
loop that would only get worse unless and until the public was made aware 23
and it was compelled by regulatory intervention to change. 24
Facebook had been getting away with so much because it runs on 25
closed software in isolated data centers beyond the reach of the public. 26
Facebook realized early on that because its software was closed, the com‑ 27
pany had the upper hand to control and shape the narrative surrounding 28
these and so many other problems it created. If there was no external aware‑ 29
ness of the problems, if there was no awareness of the truth, then there 30
would be no external pressures to deal with those problems. Software is 31
different from physical products because the user can only see its results on 32
a screen. We cannot see into the vast tangle of algorithms that produce that 33
output — ​even if those algorithms exact a crushing, incalculable cost, such S34
as unfairly influencing national elections, toppling governments, N35

PowerOfOne_HCtext1P.indd 3 3/3/23 9:52:18 AM
 F R A NC E S H AUGE N

01 fomenting genocide, or causing a teenage girl’s self-​esteem to plummet,

02 leading another to death by suicide.
03 One of the questions I was often asked after I went public was, “Why
04 are there so few whistleblowers at other technology companies, like say,
05 Apple?” My answer: Apple lacks the incentive or the ability to lie to the
06 public about the most meaningful dimensions of their business. For physi‑
07 cal products like an Apple phone or laptop, anyone can examine the physi‑
08 cal inputs (like metals or other natural resources) and ask where they came
09 from and the conditions of their mining, or monitor the physical products
10 and pollution generated to understand societal harms the company is exter‑
11 nalizing. Scientists can place sensors outside of an Apple factory and moni‑
12 tor the pollutants that may vent into the sky or flow into rivers and oceans.
13 People can and do take apart Apple products within hours of their release
14 and publish YouTube videos confirming the benchmarks Apple has pro‑
15 moted, or verify that the parts Apple claims are in there, are in fact there.
16 Apple knows that if they lie to the public, they will be caught, and quickly.
17 Facebook on the other hand provided a social network that presented a
18 different product to every user in the world. We — ​and by we, I mean par‑
19 ents, children, voters, legislators, businesses, consumers, terrorists, sex-​
20 ­traffickers, everyone — ​were limited by our own individual experiences in
21 trying to assess What is Facebook, exactly? We had no way to tell how
22 representative, how widespread or not, the user experience and harms each
23 of us encountered was. As a result, it didn’t matter if activists came forward
24 and reported Facebook was enabling child exploitation, terrorist recruiting,
25 a neo-​Nazi movement, and ethnic violence designed and executed to be
26 broadcast on social media, or unleashing algorithms that created eating
27 disorders or motivated suicides. Facebook would just deflect with versions
28 of the same talking point: “What you are seeing is anecdotal, an anomaly.
29 The problem you found is not representative of what Facebook is.”
30 Facebook also loved to remind us that the personalized “world” we saw
31 in our News Feed was heavily determined by our own choices and actions.
32 They claimed our Facebook experience was made up primarily of content
33 from our own friends and family, associates, with whom you choose to con‑
34S nect on the platform, the Pages you choose to follow, and the Groups you
35N choose to join. “Watch where you point that finger,” Nick Clegg seemed to

PowerOfOne_HCtext1P.indd 4 3/3/23 9:52:18 AM
 T H E P OW ER OF ON E

be saying in his 2021 editorial “You and the Algorithm: It Takes Two to 01
Tango.” Clegg, a savvy former member of the UK Parliament, charmingly 02
pivoted responsibility from the company to the users around the world who 03
had no way of knowing just how much Facebook was manipulating and 04
using them. It was the sort of polished deflection Clegg was paid hand‑ 05
somely to present in order to deflect from the reality that Facebook was 06
progressively filling up your News Feed with content you never asked for, 07
more and more each year, to satisfy their shareholders’ insatiable need for 08
ever-​increasing profits. The notion that “Facebook is for content from my 09
family and friends” hadn’t been true for years — ​and Facebook knew it. 10
Call it gaslighting, call it lying — ​it was intentional. Facebook knew no 11
one on the outside could counter their stories. Furthermore Facebook knew 12
that only a very few people on the inside knew the company was lying, 13
because only Facebook employees with access to the closed software could 14
see the full picture of what the company was doing. When a user, activist, 15
or government official is gaslit, Facebook steals that person’s power to 16
change their circumstances through the truth, and saps the person’s or per‑ 17
sons’ energy to fight back. But once the documents I extracted flowed into 18
public view via an unprecedented, orchestrated strategy that relied first on 19
the Wall Street Journal, and later built to a consortium of media around the 20
world, some of that veil of deceit was lifted. Hundreds if not thousands of 21
activists around the world read through “The Facebook Files” and saw 22
years of their work suddenly validated. The public had the proof from Face‑ 23
book itself, that Facebook, just like the Big Tobacco companies before it, 24
had known the toxic truth of its poison, and still fed it to us. 25
Armed with tens of thousands of pages of Facebook’s own documents, 26
and more specifically, reading the meticulously reported news stories and 27
analysis about what was in them, the public had responded dramatically. 28
In the six months after the contents of the Facebook Files had been made 29
public, Facebook’s trillion-​dollar valuation had plummeted by almost 50 30
percent and would continue to slide to as much as a 75 percent loss, includ‑ 31
ing the largest single-​day loss of corporate value to date for any publicly 32
traded US company in history. Users in the United States and Europe were 33
fleeing Facebook’s platforms. Proposed oversight bills that had languished S34
for years in the maze of government bureaucracies of Europe and the N35

PowerOfOne_HCtext1P.indd 5 3/3/23 9:52:18 AM
 F R A NC E S H AUGE N

01 United States were now zooming toward enactment. Class-​action lawyers

02 were circling, demanding justice for the grieving parents who had watched
03 their children suffer and sometimes even die. Facebook could no longer
04 hide from the truth or from the demands of the public to change. We had
05 collectively learned we no longer had to tolerate living in a world defined
06 by Facebook. The era of “just trust us” was over.
07 While the public’s hunger to learn more continued to intensify, and
08 while people began to experience some catharsis at no longer having to live
09 in a gaslit confusion and began to reconcile their lived experience with
10 Facebook’s lies, my own lived experience had transformed. I had morphed
11 from a nearly invisible data scientist and product manager to a surreal new
12 life as the Facebook whistleblower. It felt as if the world viewed me not as
13 me, not so much as a person, but rather as a symbol. As a name, a thing in
14 the news. All of a sudden, I was doing world tours and press junkets. I was
15 sitting in meetings with threat researchers discussing how trolls on the
16 dark web were cyberstalking my mom in the middle of Iowa, dissecting
17 her social media history and plotting potential actions against her and me.
18 Even months later, I would still have days when multiple journalists would
19 ask me, “Are you holding up okay? How has your life changed?”
20
21
22 Originally I had zero intention of revealing my identity. From the begin‑
23 ning, I had two basic goals: I wanted to be able to sleep at night, free of the
24 burden of carrying secrets I earnestly thought endangered the lives of tens
25 of millions of people, and I wanted to be able to drive change from the
26 background. But quickly I learned that I didn’t know very much about
27 what it really means to be a whistleblower — ​and about what it really
28 means to be myself.
29 I had enlisted the help of a nonprofit legal aid organization that has
30 supported a diverse range of government and corporate whistleblowers for
31 years. They guided me on how to legally disclose information to the SEC
32 and Congress, and how Congress can share information with reporters in a
33 protected manner.
34S To ensure that the first public interpretation of the documents was as
35N clear and accurate as possible, I also worked closely with Jeff Horwitz, a

PowerOfOne_HCtext1P.indd 6 3/3/23 9:52:18 AM
 T H E P OW ER OF ON E

journalist for the Wall Street Journal. We had met in person for the first 01
time on a hiking trail in the Oakland hills a little over a year earlier. By 02
then, I had vetted Jeff carefully and had become confident that I could 03
work anonymously with him to get the truth out. Jeff joked he was the 04
most knowledgeable person about Facebook who hadn’t signed a Facebook 05
Non-​disclosure Agreement. That’s probably accurate. I thought he had the 06
right focus. He was one of the most dogged journalists detailing Facebook’s 07
deadly impacts. I knew Jeff could help translate the complex reality of 08
Facebook into a clear picture for the public. I thought he could be the pub‑ 09
lic voice, and I could stay in the shadows. 10
As publication day for the first Wall Street Journal article approached, 11
WBA’s conversations with me shifted to questions around what I wanted 12
to do once the information was in the public arena. Their guidance was 13
simple and stark: I could do whatever I wanted, but the way they saw it, 14
there was only one plausible path forward: I would have to come out and 15
live openly in my truth and defend that truth, in order to live my life. 16
My chief advisor and lawyer was Andrew Bakaj, a former CIA officer 17
who himself had once been one of the legal non-​profit’s clients. Before 18
advising me, Andrew advised the person who was probably the group’s 19
most famous client: the anonymous whistleblower who first reported the 20
“perfect” phone call between President Donald Trump and Ukrainian 21
President Volodymyr Zelensky to the Intelligence Community Inspector 22
General. That call, of course, was the basis for the first impeachment of 23
Donald Trump. 24
One of the most notable (and material) details of that impeachment 25
was that the whistleblower remained anonymous. Major news outlets 26
thought they knew who the person was, but refused to publish their name. 27
This was not an accident. Andrew clearly laid out for me what it took to 28
keep the most critical name of the impeachment a secret. Every day for 29
weeks, he spent hours calling media outlets, saying, “If you reveal who you 30
think the whistleblower’s identity is and that person is harmed in any way, 31
we will make sure everyone knows the blood is on your hands.” Horrify‑ 32
ingly, often the person who the media thought was the whistleblower was 33
wrong — ​keeping your identity secret can put others in harm’s way. S34
Andrew provided me with a vivid portrait of what life behind the N35

PowerOfOne_HCtext1P.indd 7 3/3/23 9:52:18 AM
 F R A NC E S H AUGE N

01 anonymous curtain was like. I would likely spend years wondering what
02 would happen if my identity were revealed. As the impact of my disclo‑
03 sures grew, he said, I should assume “the Facebook whistleblower” would
04 draw a swarm of journalists hunting for the person who had revealed the
05 truth about the social media company that acted as the internet itself for
06 over a billion people and touched the lives of 3.2 billion every month.
07 Media and operatives would want to out me, ostensibly in order to assess
08 my “true” motives.
09 That’s precisely what happened with the Ukrainian whistleblower.
10 Media and other investigators dug for that person’s identity. Politicians
11 weaponized the whistleblower’s anonymity, teasing speculations about the
12 person’s identity in speeches and even trying to out the person with a writ‑
13 ten question that John Roberts, chief justice of the United States Supreme
14 Court, refused to read at the impeachment. People were obsessed with
15 unveiling that whistleblower. Andrew advised me that if I remained anon‑
16 ymous I should expect the same, for all kinds of reasons.
17 On the surface, the mystery of my identity lent itself to an archetypal
18 human story: some David standing up to a menacing and seemingly unde‑
19 featable Goliath. Even though we expected most people would view my
20 actions positively, some would not. And on the surface, there were not the
21 same risks to my life that swirled around the Ukrainian whistleblower. My
22 lawyers would not be able to tell media outlets that if they found me out
23 and published my name I could be physically harmed.
24 In light of all this, I considered another factor. I suspected that the
25 Ukrainian whistleblower had assessed (quite reasonably) that the existence
26 of a transcript of the conversation where President Trump asked the Ukrai‑
27 nian president for a favor in exchange for aid for the country’s defense was
28 clear enough that the document itself was all that would be needed for the
29 public to be informed and the case to be made. However, I imagined that
30 the whistleblower perhaps did not anticipate how their anonymity, their
31 absence from the process, would become a means to distract from and
32 undermine the substance of the disclosure.
33 When the time came for a verdict to be rendered in the impeachment,
34S the defense seized on the absence of the whistleblower, and focused their
35N energies on discrediting and casting doubt on the motives of the person

PowerOfOne_HCtext1P.indd 8 3/3/23 9:52:18 AM
 T H E P OW ER OF ON E

who chose not to be present instead of discussing the implications of the 01

United States denying military aid to Ukraine to defend against a potential 02
Russian invasion. Which, of course, happened, and would now be a critical 03
topic of tonight’s State of the Union. Without a face and voice to counter 04
the fictions used to undercut the truth, the weight of the evidence was 05
muddied and eroded. 06
It seemed to me that my disclosures were radically more complex than 07
a transcript of a single phone call. Without a voice from inside Facebook 08
that could clearly and definitively distill exactly what those documents 09
reveal, without a voice from inside Facebook who could authoritatively con‑ 10
nect the company’s pernicious algorithms and lies to its corporate 11
­culture — ​just as with that first Trump impeachment — ​those responsible 12
might not be held accountable. Facebook’s gaslighting and lies might still 13
prevail. 14
Within the 22,000 pages was deep context on how the company’s 15
products, like Facebook and Instagram, were designed and functioned; 16
how the employees of Facebook believed they should operate. This was not 17
information that just any person on the outside could intuitively under‑ 18
stand, no matter how smart, no matter how educated they were. To become 19
an expert in similarly complex fields, one can get a master’s degree or a 20
PhD. But when it comes to the dynamics of Facebook’s social-​networking 21
recommendation systems and their consequences, there is no academic 22
preparation that could make you adequately informed to independently 23
parse all the corners and nuances of the disclosures. 24
It seemed unlikely that many on the outside could understand how 25
Facebook’s unique culture birthed their unique closed-​system software. 26
The only path to deeply understanding these systems is by working at one 27
of a handful of large tech companies in specialist roles. As a result, when I 28
came forward, there were maybe three hundred or four hundred people in 29
the entire world who understood deeply enough how these systems worked 30
to understand why these documents were damning and who would be able 31
to see clearly that the fundamental threats they documented presented 32
existential threats to humanity. 33
With Jeff’s stories about to publish, I could not wait any longer to S34
decide whether I wanted to be in the public eye. I could no longer cling to N35

PowerOfOne_HCtext1P.indd 9 3/3/23 9:52:18 AM
 F R A NC E S H AUGE N

01 the fairy tale I had told myself about being an advisor behind the scenes,
02 trying to split the difference between impact and safety. I could choose to
03 avert my eyes from the fact that Facebook ultimately would know I was the
04 whistleblower by working backward from the documents that were
05 released and accept that at any moment they would be the ones to decide
06 how to introduce me to the world, their way. I listened to my advisors and
07 their hard-​earned, real-​world whistleblower experience.
08 To tease apart how society and Facebook became entangled in our dys‑
09 topian dance, what was needed was someone who came from within the
10 company and who was privy to the culture, internal machinations, and
11 interacting demands that the different departments imposed on each other.
12 Someone was needed who could provide the context and connective tissue
13 to understand why so many smart, kind, conscientious people could render
14 a product with such horrific and world-​rocking consequences. Perhaps most
15 importantly, someone was needed to warn that opaque companies like
16 Facebook posed unprecedented oversight and governance challenges: that
17 Facebook would be only the first, but not the last, opaque company to
18 wield such extensive damage on the world.
19 After considering all of this, I decided that someone would be me.
20
21
22 I came forward because I wanted the world to veer from the deadly course
23 Facebook had placed us on. I believed the only way for that to happen was
24 for me to provide briefings explaining what was in the documents and
25 answering the questions they would generate. I also understood how absurd
26 my allegations sounded. If someone said to you, “Did you know that an
27 app on your phone chooses what issues you get to vote on before you enter
28 the voting booth?” you’d roll your eyes. You might chuckle and say to
29 yourself, “Nice conspiracy theory you got there.” Maybe you’d say it out
30 loud if you were less polite.
31 There’s almost no way you’d believe that it wasn’t a single political
32 party but many groups on the right and on the left that raised those con‑
33 cerns to Facebook. Each would complain that the influence of Facebook’s
34S product and algorithms on the public forced parties and candidates to
35N embrace extreme issues they knew the majority of their constituents didn’t

10

PowerOfOne_HCtext1P.indd 10 3/3/23  9:52:18 AM

 T H E P OW ER OF ON E

like or want, but they felt they had to because it was what the algorithm 01
amplified. It was beyond belief that something that seemed like science fic‑ 02
tion could be true. But it was true. I knew all of it was true. I saw it. I was 03
present. I was there. And no one at Facebook could gaslight that away. All 04
of that was literally what the tens of thousands of pages of documents said, 05
if you knew how to read them. 06
Facebook is a for-​profit company that had the opportunity to operate in 07
the dark, and when offered the chance to cut a few corners, it cut them all. 08
After all, Facebook created the corners inside its closed software. And if the 09
public doesn’t know that a few corners or more have been cut, were they 10
ever really cut? The company had started out as a benign way for Ivy 11
League college students to stay up to date with their friends, and it had 12
continued to exploit that perception to mask a slow evolution into some‑ 13
thing new. It was no longer a human-​scale network of our family and 14
friends, but rather a hyper-​amplification machine powered by m ­ ultimillion-​ 15
person groups and algorithms that gave the most attention and promi‑ 16
nence to the most extreme ideas. 17
No single person sat down and intended to drive the company toward 18
harmful ends. Facebook was a company that fetishized consensus and a 19
mythical vision of itself where all were equal (besides Mark Zuckerberg, 20
the CEO). When I joined in 2019, its Menlo Park, California, office held 21
the record for the largest open-​floor-​plan office in the world, clocking in at 22
a quarter of a mile long. For years, when pressed before Congress, Facebook 23
executives always refused to disclose who was responsible for which 24
­decision — ​committees made decisions, they insisted, there’s no single 25
responsible person. But without individual responsibility, there is decreased 26
motivation to stand up and say, “This is unacceptable,” or even pause and 27
ask, “Should we be doing this?” Ultimately Facebook had formed a culture 28
that did not value personal accountability. How and why did that culture 29
take shape? How did it function day by day? I could explain that, too. And 30
how those cultural dots connected to the code behind the algorithms. 31
By the time I arrived at Facebook in 2019, people had been aware for at 32
least a year that the company’s decision to shift from just trying to keep 33
you using its products for as long as possible to trying to provoke a reaction S34
from you had driven a surge in extreme content. Facebook had made this N35

11

PowerOfOne_HCtext1P.indd 11 3/3/23  9:52:18 AM

 F R A NC E S H AUGE N

01 shift in late 2017 into early 2018 in response to a slow but troubling
02 decrease in the amount of content being produced on the platform. The
03 company had run many different “producer-​side” experiments on people
04 who posted content on Facebook and found that the only intervention that
05 increased the amount of content produced was giving creators more small
06 social rewards. In other words, the more people who like, comment on, and
07 reshare your content, the more likely you are to produce more content for
08 Facebook.
09 Most people only think about social media companies from the con‑
10 sumption side. As in, I go to Facebook, to Twitter, to TikTok to consume
11 content. This is a reasonable association, because the vast majority of
12 actions and time the average person spends on social media is spent on con‑
13 sumption. Social media companies, however, think of themselves as “two-​
14 sided” marketplaces that connect people who want to create with people
15 who want to consume, just as a marketplace might connect people who
16 want to sell with people who want to buy. You can’t have a buyer without a
17 seller. You can’t view content unless someone first produces it.
18 Under our current corporate law and policy, Facebook also has a duty to
19 its shareholders to generate ever-​increasing profits. There are a relatively
20 limited number of paths to accomplish this. They can create or buy entirely
21 new products; they can recruit more users to their current products; they
22 can drive more money per ad from the users they have; or they can get
23 those users to consume their products more extensively, because consum‑
24 ing more content leads to viewing and clicking on more ads. All of these
25 mechanisms allow the company to profit by selling ads to advertisers that
26 are in aggregate worth ever more money. And all of it depends on user
27 ­habits — ​natural habits or created habits.
28 By 2019, Facebook’s antitrust concerns had frozen the first path of
29 expansion. They were not going to be allowed to merge with any more
30 social media companies. Some people were even talking about breaking
31 Instagram and WhatsApp off of the core “Facebook Blue” business to spur
32 competition. The second path also showed a lack of promise. The vast
33 majority of internet users had already signed up for Facebook’s products.
34S Facebook had been investing extensively in subsidizing people to use its
35N products in ever more economically fragile corners of the world (and

12

PowerOfOne_HCtext1P.indd 12 3/3/23  9:52:18 AM

 T H E P OW ER OF ON E

closing off the opportunity for the free and open internet to form), but 01
those users individually drove little revenue, and thus the third path was 02
also closed. 03
That left one remaining path, which meant getting people to consume 04
more content. In 2018, to arrest the decline in content production, Face‑ 05
book shifted how it ranked content on its News Feed to prioritize content 06
that produced more likes, comments, and reshares. Facebook is constantly 07
and subtly training you on what kind of content belongs on the site, inten‑ 08
tionally or unintentionally. While influencers and other power users like 09
publishers carefully study what gets distributed on social media platforms 10
and consciously adapt to produce content that is similar to the most dis‑ 11
tributed items, most individuals subconsciously also alter what they create 12
for social media based on what they see in their feeds. What you see in 13
your personal feed subconsciously becomes “This is what Facebook is for.” 14
In 2018, as Facebook began to give more distribution to content that pro‑ 15
voked a reaction, individuals across the world began to see certain kinds of 16
content on Facebook more often, even if they weren’t aware that was what 17
was happening. 18
By December of 2019, its data scientists were pointing out that Face‑ 19
book had created a feedback loop that could not differentiate between posi‑ 20
tive and negative reactions. You might drop an angry face on a post or write 21
a comment, saying that you hated the article or that the article itself was 22
misinformation, but the algorithm just took it as a sign to show more simi‑ 23
lar content to you and to others, because you had engaged with it. Publish‑ 24
ers began to see that the angrier the comment thread under a link, the more 25
likely you were to click back to the source website. It always annoys me 26
when people give Facebook a pass because news outlets or websites run sen‑ 27
sationalized news. The majority of media outlets need to be profitable to 28
continue to exist, and they tune what they create ( just like political cam‑ 29
paigns) based on what the platforms share with consumers. 30
While this feedback loop had contributed to souring political discourse 31
in the United States and western Europe, in the most fragile places in the 32
world it had contributed to the deaths of tens of thousands of people by 33
pouring social media gasoline on communities already struggling with the S34
sparks of ethnic tensions and historical grievances. Facebook had faced the N35

13

PowerOfOne_HCtext1P.indd 13 3/3/23  9:52:18 AM

 F R A NC E S H AUGE N

01 first large-​scale communal violence incident in 2017 in what Amnesty

02 International described as a “social atrocity” in Myanmar, a country in
03 Southeast Asia. The country’s own military had established a network of
04 tens of thousands of accounts, pages, and groups run by a staff of seven
05 hundred military personnel to distribute and amplify propaganda target‑
06 ing the Rohingya.
07 The New York Times reported that Myanmar had years before sent large
08 groups of officers to Russia to study psychological warfare, hacking, and
09 other computer skills. Even then, Russia had established itself as the world
10 leader in social-​media-​driven cyberwarfare. Russia’s cyberops were a large
11 part of its attack on Ukraine. Anyone following the news was aware of that.
12 What I knew, as I took my seat in the guest box for the State of the Union,
13 was that Facebook had failed time and time again to address its seismic
14 role in Russia’s cyber operations, or rather, what I knew was that Facebook
15 had chosen to ignore what it was facilitating for (and with) Russia, for
16 example.
17 This investment that Myanmar had made in training and establishing
18 a broad social media network to parrot propaganda sprang into motion in
19 2017. The military used it to distribute lurid photos, false news, and
20 inflammatory posts, often aimed at Myanmar’s Muslims. Critics found it
21 difficult to oppose the fake allegations because troll accounts run by the
22 military ganged up on anyone attempting to defuse the conflict and added
23 fuel to arguments among commenters. The military trolls took a page
24 from what would become the standard ethnic-​violence playbook across the
25 world: They would post out‑of‑context or otherwise fake photos of corpses
26 that they said were evidence of Rohingya-​initiated massacres.
27
28
29 I came forward because already, in 2021, the second wave of large-​scale
30 Facebook-​fueled violence had taken shape, this time in Ethiopia, loudly
31 echoing what had occurred in Myanmar only a few years earlier. I deeply
32 believed and believe today that the choices Facebook had made about its
33 products and their rollout around the world would endanger the lives of
34S tens of millions of people over the next twenty years. I wanted to be certain
35N that the people with the ability to intervene understood the depth of this

14

PowerOfOne_HCtext1P.indd 14 3/3/23  9:52:18 AM

 T H E P OW ER OF ON E

international, destabilizing, and worsening crisis, and the only way I could 01
ensure that, I decided, was by sitting with government officials until I felt 02
confident they understood exactly what the stakes were. 03
04
05
When we reached the First Lady’s box I was seated next to Valerie Biden, 06
the president’s sister and long-​time campaign manager. One of the other 07
guests was Danielle Robinson, the widow of US Army Sergeant First Class 08
Heath Robinson. After surviving deployments to war zones in Kosovo and 09
Iraq, he died of a rare lung cancer caused by extended exposure to US mili‑ 10
tary burn pits. In the wake of her husband’s death, Danielle had dedicated 11
herself to trying to get support for the families of veterans who are sick or 12
have died because of the burn pits created and managed by the military-​ 13
industrial-​complex contractor KBR, then a wholly owned subsidiary of 14
Halliburton, a “strategy” that prioritized short term-​profits over soldiers’ 15
lives. Ukraine’s ambassador to the United States, Oksana Markarova, was 16
seated a few seats away. As we entered the box, she handed each of us a 17
small Ukrainian flag. 18
Being surrounded by people who had sacrificed and lost so much, and 19
yet who not only endured unbroken but emerged resolved to have hope and 20
affect change, was overwhelming. I felt as I often have throughout my life: 21
like I didn’t belong. I had done my very best that evening to present myself 22
in such a way that showed my respect for this solemn historical moment 23
and for such honorable and distinguished guests. Just figuring out what to 24
wear and how to appear had caused me some stress. 25
My mother was a trailblazer at the University of Iowa. I was the first 26
baby born to a female professor in her department. My existence symbol‑ 27
ized her commitment to having a family and the hardship she had to over‑ 28
come to have me in her life. As an assistant professor, she was told repeatedly 29
she would be throwing away her tenure track career if she were to have a 30
baby. Every day she wore plain dresses to her work as a professor in the Bio‑ 31
chemistry Department, in part as an expression of her disinterest in cloth‑ 32
ing and in part as a preference for efficiency over display. She did not color 33
her hair when she started to go gray because, she said, she was often the S34
youngest person in her committee meetings already. N35

15

PowerOfOne_HCtext1P.indd 15 3/3/23  9:52:18 AM

 F R A NC E S H AUGE N

01 It had taken me until I was twenty-​five and had arrived at Harvard

02 Business School (HBS) to realize how much I had missed out on. I hadn’t
03 learned (from my mother or from my peers in tech) how to access the tradi‑
04 tionally feminine parts of our culture, or of myself. Prior to that, my first
05 job out of college was at Google, with very few women more senior than
06 me to draw upon as role models. The few women I had known at Google
07 (less than 10 percent of the search quality team at the time were women)
08 had largely followed the same path as my mother, attempting to defemi‑
09 nize themselves as protective camouflage. There was only one prominent
10 exception to the rule: the head of the management rotation program I was
11 in, the vice-​president of Search, Marissa Mayer. It wouldn’t be until I
12 encountered at HBS women from the full spectrum of industries that
13 make up the world economy that I was exposed to women who were both
14 powerful and — ​because they had been trained in female-​dominant
15 ­industries — ​saw no conflict between being competent, powerful, and also
16 beautiful.
17 Before coming out, I rarely wore make up — ​maybe only a handful of
18 occasions in the decades since my teens. Thank goodness the same makeup
19 artist 60 Minutes had provided for my interview in mid-​September 2021,
20 was available to help again this evening. I wore a dress I had picked up at
21 Nordstrom Rack the day before. The dress was teal and, as I had been
22 counseled, “knee-​length and not too busy.” Thanks to the advice of a
23 trusted friend and colleague, I wore a scarf, both to complement the dress
24 and to provide a bit of warmth. At the last minute, just before we left for
25 the pre-​State of the Union dinner at the White House, a friend had secured
26 and delivered to me a pin of the Ukrainian flag.
27 From our vantage point perched above them in the box, I could see all
28 of the members of Congress who were present on the floor of the House.
29 There was the thinnest facade of unity. The reality was that the United
30 States in 2022 was dramatically polarized. I knew firsthand that the divi‑
31 sion and tribalism had in no small part been relentlessly charged by the
32 engagement-​optimizing algorithms across Facebook. After two years of a
33 global pandemic and more than a decade of exposure to a social media
34S information ecosystem that rewards and promotes extreme content, the
35N State of Union and the world were bitterly divided.

16

PowerOfOne_HCtext1P.indd 16 3/3/23  9:52:18 AM

 T H E P OW ER OF ON E

Given how divisive and politicized the response was to former president 01
Trump’s election in 2016, the United States was in a vulnerable position in 02
which many on the right believed claims of Russian interference were over‑ 03
stated sour grapes from people who opposed Trump. Now, six years later, 04
many on the right believed that the 2020 election was stolen, thanks to our 05
warped information ecosystem and the fact that Russia and Ukraine were 06
waging extensive disinformation campaigns and cyberwarfare against each 07
other along with the missiles and planes they launched at each other. 08
We live in a world where the weaponization of social media is consid‑ 09
ered by militaries to be a vital aspect of war, yet many in the United States 10
and abroad accepted Facebook’s framing of the problems of social media 11
and the available solutions. Facebook’s foremost PR victory of the previous 12
decade was tricking us into believing a false forced choice between “free‑ 13
dom” and “safety,” that we had to choose preserving “freedom of speech” 14
over “censorship.” Many people, including many people in that chamber 15
below me, did not want to discuss fixing Facebook’s problems, because 16
they were quite reasonably opposed to censorship. Facebook had convinced 17
us that those were the only two choices, when in fact the company had 18
thousands of pages documenting a world of alternatives. 19
President Biden swept into the chamber just as I had watched previous 20
presidents do in countless other televised State of the Unions. Only now I 21
was . . . ​there . . . ​here. He began his speech, as expected, with an outline of 22
the situation in Ukraine and the need for the free countries of the world to 23
stand with those who did not ask to be invaded. We all waved our Ukrai‑ 24
nian flags. 25
No one tells you in advance when in this speech your name will be 26
mentioned or how you will be introduced. When the president invoked my 27
name, I was completely caught off guard. “Frances Haugen, who is here 28
tonight with us, has shown we must hold social media platforms account‑ 29
able for the national experiment they’re conducting on our children for 30
profit. Folks — ​thank you. Thank you for the courage you showed.” Just 31
like that, before I realized what had happened, I stood and then sat down, 32
dazed. My head was spinning. 33
It had not been a smooth, linear path to this night, to this balcony, to S34
this reckoning between the public and one of the world’s largest N35

17

PowerOfOne_HCtext1P.indd 17 3/3/23  9:52:18 AM

 F R A NC E S H AUGE N

01 corporations. My journey was not that of a mythical hero, but of a small

02 and different girl who persisted over and over again in small steps that
03 added up over a long period of time. Of a teenager and young adult who
04 started by refusing to let others tell her not to exist or to get back into the
05 box they thought she belonged in. It had been a journey of learning that I
06 could make choices, make decisions about my life, and ultimately, that any
07 one person and any one decision can have enormous power. All of us have
08 more power than we realize, even if it might scare us to accept that.
09 We live in a world where a sense of fatalism easily creeps into our
10 lives — ​a sense that the problems we face are insurmountable. That we are
11 each too small to meaningfully impact anything. I want to be clear: When
12 you feel fatalism, it’s a sign that someone is trying to steal your power. It
13 isn’t always easy to see that. Hundreds of thousands of employees had
14 passed through Facebook’s doors before I had, and had not acted. Many
15 had burned out and left the company. Many others had stayed, worked very
16 hard, and accommodated themselves to the world-​defining platform they
17 were helping to create.
18 Imagine if we all realized the power of one. What world could we build
19 together if more people woke up to their own power?
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34S
35N

18

PowerOfOne_HCtext1P.indd 18 3/3/23  9:52:18 AM