27 Facts About Frances Haugen

Frances Haugen was born on 1983 or 1984 and is an American product manager, data engineer, scientist, and whistleblower.

Frances Haugen disclosed tens of thousands of Facebook's internal documents to the Securities and Exchange Commission and The Wall Street Journal in 2021.

Frances Haugen was raised in Iowa City, Iowa, where she attended Horn Elementary and Northwest Junior High School, and graduated from Iowa City West High School in 2002.

Frances Haugen's father was a doctor, and her mother became an Episcopalian priest after an academic career.

Frances Haugen later earned a Master of Business Administration from Harvard Business School in 2011.

In 2006, after graduating from college, Frances Haugen was hired by Google, and worked on Google Ads, Google Book Search, on a class action litigation settlement related to Google's publication of copyrighted book content, as well as on Google+.

At Google, Frances Haugen co-authored a patent for a method of adjusting the ranking of search results.

In 2019, Frances Haugen joined Facebook, after a person close to her became radicalized online; she "felt compelled to take an active role in creating a better, less toxic Facebook" and thought "Facebook has the potential to bring out the best of us".

On October 3,2021, Frances Haugen disclosed her identity as the Facebook whistleblower when she appeared on 60 Minutes.

The program was dissolved following the 2020 elections, which Frances Haugen stated "really feels like a betrayal of democracy to me," and which she believed contributed to the 2021 United States Capitol attack.

Frances Haugen had shared documents with members of the US Congress and offices of various attorneys general, but not with the Federal Trade Commission.

At least eight complaints were filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission by Frances Haugen's attorneys, covering topics reported by The Wall Street Journal, and including how Facebook deals with political misinformation, hate speech, teenage mental health, human trafficking, the promotion of ethnic violence, preferential treatment of certain users, and its communications with investors.

Frances Haugen's complaint included internal Facebook documents pertaining to Facebook management of misinformation and hate speech in India.

Frances Haugen alleged that Facebook was well aware of the incendiary anti-Muslim narratives promoted in India.

Frances Haugen asserted that the lack of Hindi and Bengali Facebook classifiers meant that corrective action on problematic posts was often neglected.

In February 2022, Whistleblower Aid filed two SEC complaints on behalf of Frances Haugen, alleging "material misrepresentations and omissions in statements to investors" by Facebook, related to its efforts to address climate change misinformation and COVID misinformation, based on internal Facebook documents.

On October 5,2021, Frances Haugen testified before the United States Senate Commerce Committee's Sub-Committee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety, and Data Security.

Documents disclosed by Frances Haugen were shared with state attorneys general offices in California, Massachusetts, Vermont, Nebraska and Tennessee.

On October 21,2021, Frances Haugen met with the US House Judiciary antitrust subcommittee chair David Cicilline and ranking member Ken Buck.

On October 25,2021, Frances Haugen testified before the Parliament of the United Kingdom.

Frances Haugen said the DSA has "the potential to be a global gold standard" and an inspiration for other countries on safeguarding democracy on social media.

Frances Haugen emphasized how linguistically diverse Europe could force the platforms to take a systemic approach to safety, rather than focus only on content moderation and on major languages.

On May 18,2022, after the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union had reached a political agreement on the Digital Services Act, Frances Haugen reappeared before the Parliament.

Frances Haugen congratulated the EU lawmakers for the result and called for the European Commission and the member states to put a lot of effort into enforcing the DSA, so that it will not be "a dead letter".

In 2011, Frances Haugen was diagnosed with celiac disease, and in 2014 while going through a divorce, she had to be hospitalized in intensive care.

In 2021, Frances Haugen told The Guardian she was motivated to focus her work at Facebook on addressing misinformation because of her experience with losing a friend, who had been hired to help with household tasks during her recovery, after the friend visited online forums and became a proponent of conspiratorial beliefs that included white nationalism and the occult.

Frances Haugen has Norwegian ancestry and was awarded an America-Norway Heritage Award from the Norway-America Association in 2022 for her work as a whistleblower.