You turn to us for voices you won't hear anywhere else.

Sign up for Democracy Now!'s Daily Digest to get our latest headlines and stories delivered to your inbox every day.

Facebook Whistleblower Says Co. Repeatedly Put Profit Over Safety, Calls for Regulations

HeadlineOct 04, 2021

The whistleblower who leaked tens of thousands of pages of internal Facebook documents has come forward. Former Facebook product manager Frances Haugen spoke publicly for the first time on CBS’s “60 Minutes.”

Frances Haugen: “Facebook has demonstrated they cannot act independently. Facebook over and over again has shown it chooses profit over safety. It is subsidizing, it is paying for its profits, with our safety. I am hoping that this will have had a big enough impact on the world that they get the fortitude and the motivation to actually go put those regulations into place.”

Haugen’s revelations, which were behind a sweeping investigation by The Wall Street Journal, showed Facebook executives had significant understanding of the way its products are implicated in issues including child safety, political misinformation and human trafficking. Haugen is testifying before a Senate panel Tuesday. Lawmakers are also pursuing Facebook as part of a federal antitrust case and over its role in the January 6 Capitol insurrection.

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.

Non-commercial news needs your support

We rely on contributions from our viewers and listeners to do our work.
Please do your part today.
Make a donation
Top