The Whistleblower’s Guide to Fixing Facebook

A product manager who’d worked at Facebook Inc. turned over reams of pages of internal documents to government officials and the Wall Street Journal earlier this year because, she said, she’d reached the conclusion that the company was unable to change on its own. When there were “conflicts of interest between profits and the common good and public safety, Facebook consistently chose to prioritize its profits,” Frances Haugen told Congress at a public hearing on Oct. 5. “I realized we needed to get help from the outside, that the only way these problems would be solved is by solving them together, not solving them alone.”

The hearing came after weeks of damaging revelations based on the documents Haugen shared with the Journal and the day after a technical problem took down Facebook’s core products for hours, contributing to a sense of crisis at the company. Haugen told Congress what she thought Facebook had to do to make its main social network and its Instagram photo-sharing platform safer, healthier, and less polarizing. There are lots of ideas on this subject—Congress and federal enforcement agencies have spent the last several years formulating their own plans to hold Facebook to account—and Haugen’s suggestions didn’t always align with those of the company’s harshest critics.