Facebook Insider Promises ‘Frightening Truth’

The Facebook Inc. whistle-blower who turned over a trove of internal company documents to U.S. securities regulators will tell senators that the company misled the public and shareholders about the harmful effects of its platforms, according to her testimony, reports Bloomberg.

“Facebook became a $1 trillion company by paying for its profits with our safety, including the safety of our children,” Frances Haugen will tell the Senate Tuesday. “I came forward because I recognized a frightening truth: almost no one outside of Facebook knows what happens inside Facebook. The company’s leadership keeps vital information from the public, the U.S. government, its shareholders, and governments around the world.”

Haugen, a 37-year-old former product manager at the company, is set to testify before a panel of the Senate Commerce Committee about internal Facebook research that she says shows the company prioritized profit, stoking division, undermining democracy and harming the mental-health of its youngest users. Haugen shared Facebook’s internal research with the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Wall Street Journal.

The hearing comes the day after Facebook and its photo-sharing platform Instagram and messaging service WhatsApp experienced rare global outages. The company’s shares fell 4.9% Monday after Haugen revealed her identity in an interview with CBS’s “60 Minutes” on Sunday evening.

The question for lawmakers now is how to craft and pass legislation to prevent the harms Haugen described. While there are numerous proposals to tighten regulations on internet companies, there has been little momentum so far to move bills through the process to become law.

Haugen will tell senators that the starting point for effective regulation is full access to Facebook data so that the public has insight into the company’s systems. Regulators today are blind to Facebook’s problems and how to craft solutions, she said.

“As long as Facebook is operating in the dark, it is accountable to no one,” she said. “And it will continue to make choices that go against the common good.”