Facebook Whistleblower Reveals Ugly Truths, Stock Sinks Bigly on Monday
On Sunday night, Facebook took a major shot across the bow, and the company is poised to lose a fortune on account of it.
A whistleblower from deep within the company has now come forward to detail earlier reports of Facebook’s immoral and unscrupulous behavior, suggesting in no uncertain terms that the social media giant has been prioritizing profits over people for some time, and using clickbait to do so.
The identity of the Facebook whistleblower who released tens of thousands of pages of internal research and documents — leading to a firestorm for the social media company in recent weeks — was revealed on “60 Minutes” Sunday night as Frances Haugen.
Advertisement - story continues belowThe 37-year-old former Facebook product manager who worked on civic integrity issues at the company says the documents show that Facebook knows its platforms are used to spread hate, violence and misinformation, and that the company has tried to hide that evidence.
“The thing I saw at Facebook over and over again was there were conflicts of interest between what was good for the public and what was good for Facebook, and Facebook over and over again chose to optimize for its own interests, like making more money,” Haugen told “60 Minutes.”
And then…
“I’ve seen a bunch of social networks, and it was substantially worse at Facebook than anything I’ve seen before,” Haugen said. “At some point in 2021, I realized I’m going to have to do this in a systemic way, that I’m going to have to get out enough [documents] that no one can question that this is real.”
The news caused Facebook stocks to sink on Monday, with the company trading approximately 5% lower around noon.
Later in the afternoon, Facebook and other platforms owned by Facebook went down, with no explanation. The cynical among us have suggested that the outage was simply a tactic used to reset the online narrative surrounding the tech giant, as the lapse in service was soon trending on Twitter.