How Meta got busted for harming teenage girls, boosting cartels and more – New York Post

On a December afternoon in 2020, Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz drove to Redwood Regional Park, just east of Oakland, Calif., for a mysterious meeting. For months, he’d been working on a story about Facebook, albeit with little luck finding anyone from the company willing to talk. But then he reached out to Frances Haugen. On paper, she didn’t seem like the most obvious candidate for a whistleblower. A mid-level product manager on Facebook’s Civic Integrity team, Haugen, 35, had only been with the social network for a little less than a year and a half. But she was eager. “People needed to understand what was going on at Facebook, she said, and she had been taking some notes that she thought might be useful in explaining it,” Horwitz writes in his new book, “Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets” (Doubleday). Haugen didn’t want to talk by email or even phone, insisting it was too dangerous. Instead, she suggested meeting at a hiking trail for privacy — even even sent Horwitz the address via an encrypted messaging app. According to the book, Facebook — co-founded by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg (above) — “eroded faith in
Read More