LIttle Brown & Co./ Hachette Book Group The Power of One: How I Found the Strength to Tell the Truth and Why I Blew the Whistle on Facebook—Frances Haugen (Little Brown and Company, 2023, 323 pp.)
Reviewed by A. David Wunsch
Frances Haugen is smart and aggressive and takes chances. As an outstanding student from Iowa City, IA—where she skipped a grade—she elected to study electrical and computer engineering at Olin College of Engineering in Needham, MA. The reader may not be familiar with that school—it is only 28 years old—and at the time she entered its first class, it was still unaccredited. Olin is noted for emphasizing engineering design and student collaboration.
Haugen’s autobiography takes us from her childhood until the time when she was invited in March 2022 to attend President Biden’s State of the Union address as a special guest where she is introduced by him to a national audience. Honored as a whistleblower, she had exposed her former employer, Facebook, producing 22,000 pages of documents of its Civic Misinformation and Counter Espionage Teams. Haugen’s role as troublemaker had begun the year before when she approached the Securities and Exchange Commission to proclaim that Facebook had failed in its duty to protect children who were its customers, had ignored national security threats, and used algorithms influencing political party platforms. Her thesis was that Facebook had done so to maximize its profits, and she alleged: “Facebook was endangering the world and that the company was stuck in a downward feedback loop that would only get worse unless and until the public was made aware and it was compelled by regulatory intervention to change.”
This is a book about someone’s work life, which could also be seen as a plea for ethics and humanities in undergraduate engineering education.
Haugen tells her story chronologically, but it is primarily a professional autobiography. We learn little about her parents: her mother was a professor of biochemistry, the first woman in her department to have a baby, while her father is a medical doctor. There are rather few personal details, e.g., we are told that she marries, her husband proves to be gay, and they divorce. Mention is made of a second marriage, but we learn little of the new man. This is a book about someone’s work life, which could also be seen as a plea for ethics and humanities in undergraduate engineering education. Certain personal problems are described and only add to our picture of Haugen as a fighter: she becomes afflicted with neuropathy resulting from celiac disease and, for a time, must use a wheelchair.
After graduating from Olin, Haugen sought admission to the Harvard Business School. She was accepted with the proviso that she spent at least two years in the business world prior to entering, so she accepted employment with Google, where she observed that blond women—she is one—did not do the coding. However, her work as a product manager is exceptional enough that Google rewards her with a working vacation—a trip around the world. She comes back to work on Google Books—a project to make available online the world’s books. Her job is to expand the number of languages made available in the service.
After three years at Google, she enters Harvard Business School in the fall of 2009. The picture she presents is not a congenial one. Seating is assigned—in any course, you sit in the same class for each meeting. A group of male students sitting behind her audibly scoffed when she spoke. Some other female students also subject to scorn managed to bring it to a stop—the book is vague on how they pulled it off.
To Haugen’s dismay, the head of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, broke up her team after the 2020 U.S. election leaving her angry and bitter.
Having graduated from Harvard, she returned to Google where she was to spend seven and a half years. Her marriage ends, and her health, plagued by celiac disease, falters. Her career suffers a 15-month pause, and she spends two months in the hospital. Blowing the whistle on Facebook, she remarks, is not the hardest thing she has done—it was recovering from this period of illness. The hiatus in her professional life ended when she went to work for Yelp—a site that rates shopping experiences, especially restaurants. A year later, she leaves them for a much higher-paying job at Pinterest, a website whose function is to bring to your attention images you might like based on your past preferences. The relationship is not a happy one, and after an unfavorable performance review, she quits. She then worked briefly for an unnamed startup before joining Facebook in June 2019.
Haugen becomes a member and a lead product manager of the Civic Misinformation Team in the Integrity Organization of the company. The team’s goal is to eliminate the dissemination of wrong or misleading information. Haugen’s thinking is motivated by her knowledge of the potential destructive power of a new medium. She remarks on the movable type printing press whose invention in the West dates from the mid-15th century. Up until that time, literacy in Europe was the privilege of the Catholic Clergy. However, reading ability spread to the laity in the latter half of that century, motivated in part by newly printed pamphlets underlying Martin Luther’s Protestant Reformation. False accusations, spread in print, lead to the killing of “witches” and the dissemination of Luther’s own anti-Semitism; there follows centuries of religiously motivated bloodshed. In Haugen’s words, the lesson is that “changing the information ecosystem overnight without giving the world time to adapt could be catastrophic.” Here, she cites evidence that implicated Facebook: in 2017, the country of Myanmar (once known as Burma) experienced a “social atrocity.” Russia had participated in Facebook’s cyber operations with the complicity of Myanmar’s military, which distributed fake news and photographs aimed against Myanmar’s Muslims. Ethnic tensions, already high, were exacerbated by the Internet, and tens of thousands of Muslims died.
To Haugen’s dismay, the head of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, broke up her team after the 2020 U.S. election leaving her angry and bitter. She comes to believe that the organization is privileging profit over the security of the worldwide population of Facebook users. She states, “Over time, I would come to recognize that Facebook very selectively presents the data regarding its efforts to fight misinformation or any other harm on the platform. They love to share stats with the public that tell the story they want to tell but not numbers that would actually shine light on what was happening behind closed doors … . At most, it felt like a show piece.” She fears that in the absence of the Civic Information Team, atrocities such as occurred in Myanmar would become more frequent.
Left to work in a group having less power and focus, an angry Haugen is in touch with Jeff Horwitz of The Wall Street Journal. She is pleased to have a newspaper known to be pro-business and right-wing to investigate Facebook’s feckless attempts at controlling fake news, especially as it influences elections. She is especially outraged at how Facebook was employed as a tool by the Washington rioters on January 6, 2021.
Facebook allows her to live and work in Puerto Rico during the pandemic, a place she chooses because the climate is helpful in soothing her celiac disease. Horwitz visits her there, and she begins to take thousands of computer screen photographs to document her story. She uses her own camera as the usual screenshots formed by a computer could be sensed by her employer, and she is afraid of detection before her work is done.
After the end of the COVID epidemic, Facebook was no longer willing to let her work from Puerto Rico, a place where she felt especially comfortable. She resigned from her position in May 2021 and got in touch with the Securities and Exchange Commission where she accused her employer of misleading investors. By being in contact with them and Congress, she is afforded whistleblower protection from a potentially vindictive company. She is aided by a legal team that advises her in these matters. The questions of how these lawyers are paid for and how she supports herself having left Facebook are never addressed.
In September 2021, The Wall Street Journal began a nine-part series called The Facebook Files. It addressed such matters as Facebook’s treatment of youth, its stance on drug trafficking, the functioning of its algorithms, medical drug misinformation, and the bending of rules for famous figures. The name of the whistleblower was not made evident at first, but the TV show 60 Minutes in October 2021 revealed her identity. Also, in October, she appeared before a subcommittee of the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee.
Haugen is a fine storyteller. However, her work needs to be longer, with a postscript, especially in light of news in 2025. Recent events call out for a statement from her: On January 7, 2025, Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, announced that it was ending its traditional fact-checking program. It would allow a greater tolerance for what might have once been seen as false speech and would rely on its users rather than itself to correct falsehoods. Mark Zuckerberg announced, “It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression.” He did admit that “It means that we’ll catch less bad stuff but we’ll also reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down.” On January 9, an opinion piece in The New York Times by Kevin Roose interpreted the new policy as an attempt by Zuckerberg to ingratiate himself with President-elect Donald Trump and his incoming administration. Their relationship has not always been cozy. Roose observes that in the 2020 election year, when Facebook was keen on election integrity efforts, presidential candidate Trump threatened Zuckerberg with life in prison. Three days before the Roose piece, Meta announced its new board members including Dana White, a close friend of Donald Trump. Roose also reports that the company was also changing its rules to allow more criticism of various groups including immigrants and transgender people. Although the company does maintain a “content review” section, Meta announced that it is being moved from liberal California to the conservative state of Texas. Haugen is eminently well qualified to write on these changes, and I look forward to her appearance in print once again.
A. David Wunsch is a professor emeritus in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, Lowell, MA 01854 USA. He is the Book Review Editor of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine. Email: David_Wunsch@uml.edu.
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