The former Facebook manager who exposed tens of thousands of internal documents in the fall and accused her former employer of caring more about money than about public safety has a book deal.
Little Brown and Company announced on Thursday that it had acquired a planned memoir, offering a critical examination of Facebook by Frances Haugen. The book does not yet have a title or release date. Financial terms were not disclosed.
Haugen said they operate in the dark.
They win by keeping their systems closed without oversight or transparency, and by shrouding their operations in secrecy and PR spin. I believe that every human being deserves the dignity of truth, and the truth is that Facebook buys its astronomical profits by sacrificing our safety. But it does not have to be this way - these problems are solvable. We can have social media we love that brings out the best in humanity. I hope that this book will show us the way. In Senate testimony in October, Haugen said that the company had failed to make changes to Instagram even after internal research showed apparent harm to some teens and did not do enough to combat hate speech and misinformation.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg disputed her accounts, calling them a false picture of the company, but shared her view that the government needed to update its internet regulations.
Haugen, a native of Iowa City, Iowa, is a data expert with a degree in electrical and computer engineering from Olin College and a master's degree in business from Harvard. She had had 15 years of experience with tech companies, including Google and Yelp, before joining Facebook in 2019 and joining its civic integrity unit as lead product manager.
After the election in November 2020, Facebook removed the civic integrity unit, a decision that Haugen said helped convince her that the company could not be trusted to invest what needs to be invested to keep Facebook from being dangerous. She left Facebook in May, but not before she spent weeks reviewing and copying documents.