The daughter of a doctor and an Episcopalian priest, Frances Haugen learned to walk a straight line from an early age. Born in Iowa City, Iowa in 1983, she moved east to Massachusetts to join the inaugural class of the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering, where she studied electrical and computer engineering. She then went on to earn an MBA from Harvard Business School in 2011.
Haugen moved quickly through the tech world, landing jobs at Google, Yelp, and Pinterest before being hired at Facebook as a Product Manager in the Civic Integrity Department in 2019. She credits her openness and willingness to speak up against corruption to growing up with a priest as a mother. “I am really lucky that my mother is an episcopal priest,” says Haugen. “I lived with her for six months last year and I had such profound distress because I was seeing these things inside of Facebook and I was certain it was not going to be fixed inside of Facebook.”
After a couple years as a project manager with Facebook, Haugen began growing increasingly uncomfortable with the misinformation the company was complicit in spreading. She also took issue with what she perceived as the lack of safety controls in African and Middle Eastern markets, where militant groups were using the platform as a tool for human trafficking.
In 2021, Haugen began meeting with civilian and government key players to begin a whistleblowing campaign. She argued that Facebook put “astronomical profits before people,” and needed to be regulated more closely. In September of that year, Haugen worked with the Wall Street Journal to publish a series of articles based on the tens of thousands of company files she took with her when she quit her job.
Haugen hasn’t just aired her concerns in the United States. She’s also argued in front of the European Parliament for more government regulation of the social media giant. Fixing the problems of a company that inhabits every corner of the globe is a tall order and will take some time. In the meantime, Haugen resides in Puerto Rico, where she is working on memoirs to be published by Little, Brown & Company.