Facebook Whistleblower Frances Haugen Regrets Nothing – Vanity Fair

“I haven’t called my mom enough, that’s definitely true,” former Facebook product manager turned whistleblower Frances Haugen told me on a recent summer Friday. Other than that? She doesn’t have many big regrets. Haugen is dialing in from a moving car: Such is life on the public-speaking circuit, where she has spent much of the last two years since going public as the former employee whose disclosures so tanked the credibility of the company in question that you now know it by its rebranded name, Meta. But for old time’s sake—and to preserve the historicity of Facebook still being Facebook back in 2021, when Haugen shared tens of thousands of internal documents detailing the platform’s systemic toxicity-for-profit mindset—Haugen and I both avoid that shiny new name throughout our conversation about the ensuing years of post–“Facebook Files” fallout. If we’re getting picky about regrets, Haugen, who resides in Puerto Rico these days, does wish she could have convened a broader consortium of journalists sooner to unpack the documents for the world. Otherwise, she’s glad we’re all here now, at this point in time when the danger of unregulated social media is such a public concern that even the surgeon general is getting involved. “We’re talking about a
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