The faux whistleblower went to Harvard (majoritiy are social engineeers)
Early life and education
Haugen was born and raised in Iowa City, Iowa, where she attended Iowa City West High School.[1][2] Her father was a doctor and her mother became an Episcopalian priest after an academic career.[3][4] She studied computer science and electrical engineering in the founding class at the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering,[5] and graduated in 2006.[6]She later earned a Master of Business Administration from Harvard Business School in 2011.[7][8][9]
Career
After graduating college, Haugen was hired by Google, and she worked on Google Ads, Google Book Search, a class action litigation settlement related to Google publishing book content, as well as Google+.[5] During her career at Google, she completed her MBA, which was paid for by Google.[5] She has said she is a co-founder of the desktop dating app Secret Agent Cupid, precursor to the mobile app Hinge.[10][9]
In 2015, she began work as a data product manager at Yelp to improve search using image recognition, and after a year, moved to Pinterest.[4][9] In 2018, when Facebook recruited Haugen, she expressed interest in a role related to misinformation, and in 2019, she became a product manager in the Facebook civic integrity department.[3] While at Facebook, she decided it was important to become a whistleblower, and left her position at Facebook in May 2021.[11] In the spring of 2021, she contacted John Tye, a founder of the nonprofit law firm Whistleblower Aid, for help, and Tye agreed to represent her and to help protect her anonymity.[12] In the late summer of 2021, she began meeting with members of the United States Congress, including Senator Richard Blumenthal and Senator Marsha Blackburn.[13]
Facebook Civic Integrity revelations Edit
Beginning in September 2021, The Wall Street Journal published The Facebook Files, "based on a review of internal Facebook documents, including research reports, online employee discussions and drafts of presentations to senior management."[14][11][7] The investigation is a multi-part series, with nine reports including an examination of exemptions for high-profile users, impacts on youth, the impacts of its 2018 algorithm changes, weaknesses in the response to human trafficking and drug cartels, vaccine misinformation, and Haugen, who gathered the documents that supported the investigative reports.[14]
Haugen disclosed her identity as the whistleblower when she appeared on 60 Minutes on October 3, 2021.[11][7] During the interview, Haugen discussed the Facebook program known as Civic Integrity, which was intended to curb misinformation and other threats to election security.[7] According to Haugen, the program was dissolved after the 2020 election, and she said, "that really feels like a betrayal of democracy to me,"[11] and the dissolution contributed to the 2021 United States Capitol attack.[15] Haugen also discussed "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."[7][1
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frances_Haugen