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My new book Broken Code tells the story ofFacebook’s — now Meta‘s — long-secret work to understand how its platforms shaped its users’ behavior and rein in societal-grade harms that the outside world didn’t understand. Drawing on records gathered by whistleblower Frances Haugen and other company employees, my book reveals the architecture of Meta’s failures and internal employee efforts to fix them.
Such well-intentioned work often foundered against Meta’s relentless drive for growth, a culture of slapdash engineering and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s conviction thatFacebookmerely reflected itsusers desires— despite compelling internal research to the contrary.
While disillusioned employees generally drifted off quietly, Haugen took a different approach. This excerpt tells the story of my unusual working relationship with theFacebookproduct manager, who moved to Puerto Rico shortly before embarking on a documentcollectionbinge that would unearth years of corporate secrets.
Just after the 2020 election I had blind messaged Frances Haugen and a couple dozen of her colleagues at Civic, the team that worked on disinformation, coordinated manipulation, and other politics-related problems that arose on Facebook’s platforms. The note sent via LinkedIn said I was familiar with the team’s work, knew there was internal tension around it, and thought their efforts deserved attention.
In accordance with company rules on media contacts — and the nondisclosure agreement every employee signs upon accepting a job at Facebook — several employees dutifully forwarded my message to Facebook’s PR team, and a couple of others sent me polite notes declining to speak. But Haugen had been sitting on it for a month. She had read the stories I had coauthored in the Wall Street Journal about Facebook’s willingness to tolerate hate speech and rule violations in India, and how its head of India Policy had openly discussed her disdain for opponents of the country’s ruling party.
After some back and forth, on a mid-December afternoon in 2020, I drove to a trailhead at Redwood Regional Park in the hills above Oakland, California. It was a temperate day, but Haugen emerged from her car wearing a heavy parka, fleece, gloves, leggings, and ankle warmers. As joggers passed by in shorts, Haugen told me the story of her nerve damage. Even a slight chill still meant hours of excruciating pain.
Haugen had texted me on an encrypted messaging app the evening of the all-hands meeting in which Civic’s dismantling had been announced.
She had spent the last several months taking notes about her misgivings, as she grew more certain that Facebook wasn’t committed to integrity work. Whenever something bothered her or felt significant, she wrote it down. She didn’t know what she was going to do with this material. She had reached out to a tech advocacy nonprofit, but her contact there told her it wasn’t in the business of whistleblowing.
That Saturday afternoon, we walked for a few minutes, the trail a little too heavily trafficked by joggers and mountain bikers, before pulling off into a clearing to have a real chat. As she ran through her work at the company, she frequently stopped to quiz me on what I knew of various Facebook systems and processes. There was no doubt she was auditioning me: talking to a reporter would be a breach of her nondisclosure agreement with Facebook and potentially the end of her tech career. Beyond asking how I intended to keep her identity safe, she was looking for evidence that talking to me was worth the risk.
We spoke until an early dusk fell below the big trees. On the way back to our cars, Haugen suggested we start meeting regularly. At the very least, she said, answering questions might clarify her thinking and help her identify what was important to document before she left Facebook.
If Haugen had reached out to me first, rather than the other way around, I would have been paranoid. Though Facebook had never tried to play tricks on me, a well-placed employee dangling such extraordinary assistance at a first meeting seemed too good to be true.
I spent half my drive home trying to imagine how she could be the bait in some elaborate setup and the other half readying myself for disappointment when she didn’t follow through. Taking stock of everything that could go wrong, I also found myself a little uncomfortable with the intensity of her convictions. I hadn’t betrayed my skepticism during our meeting, but Haugen had twice in our talk said that she was motivated to help me because, if she didn’t expose what was known inside Facebook, millions of people would likely die.
With the United Nations having already blamed the company for driving ethnic cleansing in Myanmar, her claim couldn’t be completely dismissed out of hand. But it still seemed grandiose.
The role of Facebook and other platforms in the January 6 insurrection that would come just a few weeks later left me a little less sure.
Haugen quietly began building a stable of internal documents, though she had sound security reasons not to explore too widely within Facebook’s systems. She was part of an Investigations and Intelligence team, which gave her ready access to some extremely sensitive stuff. If someone asked why she was snooping around the “information corridor” work, she would have a readier answer than an employee in, say, Instagram‘s ad sales department. Still, she knew that Facebook logged what people viewed and did on its internal network, called Workplace. We discussed the information she was finding, but the goal wasn’t to rush things into print — neither of us was eager to kick off a leak investigation.
By the spring of 2021, however, Haugen was starting to drift a little. Our outdoor backyard lunches of takeout sushi, where she would unpack her experience at Facebook and thoughts about the platform’s design, could be revelatory, but they were becoming fewer and farther between. Sometimes as much as a week or two would go by before she would respond to a Signal message.
The initial burst of energy she’d derived from working with a journalist was long since gone, and even thinking about what to do with the information was stressful. By March, I was routinely failing to pin Haugen down for meetings. Given that she had already spent dozens of hours walking me through Facebook’s internal recommendation and enforcement systems, I was hardly in a position to whine, but the lengthening silences stung nonetheless.
“I’m sorry I’ve been a flake this week;” she texted on March 22, 2021. “I’m flying out to Puerto Rico tomorrow evening.”
A number of her friends who shared an interest in tech startup and cryptocurrency and investing were moving to Puerto Rico. She was also tired of the Bay Area’s chilly summer evenings, and had noticed a strained relationship with one of her housemates. (Haugen later learned that the woman had picked up on her Facebook information collection and had begun telling mutual acquaintances that she believed Haugen was an undercover federal agent.) Since Facebook was allowing its employees to work from anywhere during the pandemic, giving Puerto Rico a try seemed relatively low stakes. She could always change her mind and come back to California.
I didn’t hear from Haugen again for a couple of weeks, until she called with some bad news. After she had flown to Puerto Rico and rented an apartment in San Juan, she had updated her address in Facebook’s payroll system, prompting a call from Human Resources. While the company could support employees relocating to other countries during the pandemic, the vagaries of payroll taxes in U.S. territories made her continued employment in Puerto Rico impossible. She would need to promptly return to the States or resign by mid-May at the latest, a little over a month off.
Already questioning her stamina as an internal Facebook mole, she decided to stay in San Juan. Whatever information gathering she was going to do would have to be finished before her final day at Facebook.
“I would like for us to figure out a way to do things remotely;’ Haugen texted me.
We tried that for a week. But Haugen was clearly exhausted. As much as she was a one-woman operation, having company was helpful. So, with the encouragement of my editor, Brad Reagan, I floated the idea of joining her in San Juan, just for a few days. She accepted.
“So are you here for crypto, too?” asked the guy with whom I was splitting a cab from Luis Muñoz Marin Airport into the city. He had sold his house and business in Pasadena in late 2020 and, in defiance of every principle of financial management, dumped the full proceeds into Bitcoin, Ethereum, and a couple more obscure cryptocurrencies. His portfolio doubled in just two months.
I never saw the guy again after he got out of our cab in San Juan’s Condado neighborhood, but the brief encounter left an impression. Among the mainland’s newly arrived expats, there was an impressive tolerance for risk.
I found Haugen unfazed by her pending unemployment and change of locale. After taking a short vacation, she was spending most of her time with her laptop at a small table surrounded by unopened packages that she and a new crop of roommates had shipped to themselves before moving to San Juan. Three hours ahead of the West Coast, she planned to spend each morning documenting what she could and then put in a regular workday when her team in Menlo Park came online. In the evenings, we would meet for dinner and talk.
Haugen and I had long ago discussed that, if she actually pulled as much material as she was contemplating, she would almost certainly get caught by Facebook. She was, at least in principle, okay with that eventuality. But her goal was to survive as long as she could, ideally leaving the company before anyone wised up. To that end, she had largely documented topics directly relevant to her job and avoided rummaging. Consequently, neither she nor I had a good sense of what would be accessible to her once she started exploring Facebook’s broader network of Workplace groups, online documents, tracking metrics, and incident response tickets.
The only reasonable assumption was: not much. After leaking had spiked following employee discontent over the company’s response to Trump’s infamous “looting and shooting” post, Facebook had begun locking down its systems. Forums that were once viewable by anybody with an employee ID were becoming invitation-only, and newly hired internal moderators would sometimes disappear controversial posts from Workplace.
Workplace was a tough system to navigate, shockingly resistant to keyword searches, littered with unlabeled hyperlinks, voluminous in scale. Much of this could be attributed to vestiges of Facebook’s historic culture of openness, but some of it was pure fuckup. Documents subject to supposed attorney-client privilege and draft presentations to Zuckerberg, complete with the full history of senior executive edits, were occasionally posted in places where north of 60,000 employees could view them.
Like its public-facing sibling, Facebook’s internal platform sometimes got spicy. People were almost always polite — they were interacting with colleagues, after all — but frustrations were often aired in comments sections rather than diplomatically worded emails.
Employees on the way out the door could be especially scathing. The company had a tradition of “badge posting;’ in which departing staffers would combine a picture of the employee ID they were about to turn in with their parting thoughts to colleagues. Amid expressions of gratitude and invitations to keep in touch, employees sometimes explained why they had chosen to quit.
As the mood within Facebook had begun to sour over the years, some badge posts began to take on a more mutinous tone. Staffers who had done groundbreaking work on radicalization, human trafficking, and misinformation would summarize both their accomplishments and where they believed the company had come up short on technical and moral grounds.
These posts were gold mines for Haugen, connecting product proposals, experimental results, and ideas in ways that would have been impossible for an outsider to recreate. She photographed not just the posts themselves but the material they linked to.
Haugen spent most mornings gathering documents and the rest of the workday finishing up her actual tasks at Facebook, though she was beginning to sneak research sessions in during Zoom calls. Long afterward, her colleagues would tell me that her investigations included asking what were, in hindsight, unusual questions, such as, Did they recall where to find the link to their work documenting the prevalence of hate speech in Amharic, the most widely spoken language in Ethiopia?
I spent most days trying to understand what she had gathered, and most evenings we would meet for dinner and drinks and talk over what it all added up to. Haugen was averaging a few hundred screenshots a day. From what I could tell, they were a blurry mess, but almost always legible.
Working with a source siphoning documents is a tricky business, with ethical and legal considerations intertwined. I could not ask her to gather specific documents, nor could I even lay a finger on her keyboard, a move that the Journal’s lawyers made clear could potentially open me up to charges under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the federal law under which most hacking crimes get prosecuted.
That left me with a limited mandate. My work consisted of discussing whatever information Haugen wanted to share, researching whatever was known about the topic outside of the company, and then asking follow-up questions.
The broader picture that emerged was not that vile things were happening on Facebook — it was that Facebook knew. It knew the extent of the problems on its platform, it knew (and usually ignored) the ways it might address them, and, above all, it knew how the dynamics of its social network differed from those of either the open internet or offline life.
After four or five days in San Juan, I had learned enough to compellingly argue to my editor that my trip wasn’t just deep cover for a beach vacation. I went to Marshalls to buy clean clothes and rented a vacation condo a short walk from Haugen’s apartment. We would use the apartment as our joint office, eager to avoid exposing her roommates to a one-woman espionage operation. I would stay until Haugen quit, got fired, or wanted to stop.
Gathering the documents took time. Some of her investigation was deliberate but much was the result of a whim. Haugen’s actual work at Facebook focused on networked misinformation. But we had talked over questions about Instagram’s effects on teenage mental health. Could there be anything there?
Haugen spent a half hour searching and didn’t find much. That evening, she tried again and turned up a few documents. Among them was a 2019 presentation by user experience researchers finding that, while causality was hard to establish, Instagram’s aesthetic of casual perfection could trigger negative thinking among some users. The researchers’ best understanding was summarized this way: “We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls.”
Holy shit.
I was astonished not just by the finding but by the fact that we’d found it at all. Stuff like this was still sitting there, viewable by anyone who poked around. Somehow, before Haugen, no one had.At minimum, this was a monumental failure on the part of Facebook’s Security team. Anyone monitoring the search volume of this soon-to-resign employee’s activity might have raised an eyebrow at how much information she was consuming.
Facebook’s leak defenses were predicated on the bet that people like Haugen, with well-paid desk jobs, wouldn’t throw away a golden ticket, or risk the possibility of a lawsuit from a trillion-dollar company. She was contemptuous of that thinking from the start. Compared with the dangers she believed Facebook posed to users overseas in particular, the risk of screwing up a cushy career didn’t rank.
Still, every morning Haugen woke up scared that she would find that a meeting with Facebook’s Security team had been booked on her calendar. She asked whether I thought Facebook would sue her. I could truthfully say that there was no record of Facebook going to court over whistleblower violations. I had to include a caveat: no Facebook employee had previously undertaken a six-month espionage campaign while working on a team devoted to counterespionage.
Haugen said she was ready to accept whatever consequences might come, but the frequency with which she brought up the risks was a stark reminder of which one of us had more on the line. She began working to get her expired passport renewed because, well, one never knows.
As one week turned to two and then three, with no sign that the company would step in to stop her before her final day in mid-May, a new topic of conversation between us emerged. If she failed to grab something important in her remaining time at the company, it was likely that nobody else would ever have the chance. She had already taken 10,000 screenshots, amassing a horde of information that surely amounted to the largest leak in the company’s history. It was bizarre that corporate security was as loose as it was, and flatly implausible that it would stay that way once the information she had gathered had been revealed.
To make best use of our time during Haugen’s final week at the company, we converted my vacation studio into a half-assed office for two. Haugen took the table and I took the bed. If she needed privacy for a call with colleagues, I would go out onto the balcony, though I sometimes stuck around for less sensitive conversations.
The days grew longer as our time grew short. I would fetch coffee before Haugen arrived in the morning, then order food delivery for our meals. We took our lunch breaks on the balcony, and when we could see manatees grazing on seagrass in the Condado Lagoon below, we would joke that they were her efforts’ mascot. Haugen brought over a portable speaker so she could play dance music at night when we got tired. Of her final forty-eight hours at Facebook, we worked thirty-eight.
Haugen was due to lose access to Facebook’s network at 7:00 p.m. on May 17 and I had made a reservation for that time at an upscale restaurant to celebrate. I called a cab for 6:30 p.m. to take us there, but Haugen was still busy downloading the company’s entire organizational chart, an especially delicate task that she had chosen for last. I went downstairs, paid the driver $20 to not leave, and then went back up to my apartment to hurry her out the door.
Before she closed her laptop, she entered one final search query into Workplace, assuming it would be the final thing that Facebook’s Security team would see in the inevitable forensic review.
“I don’t hate Facebook;’ it began. “I love Facebook. I want to save it.”
She finished typing, pressed enter, and closed her laptop. A day later, I flew back to the West Coast and got to work.
From BROKEN CODE: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets by Jeff Horwitz, to be published on November 14 by Doubleday, an imprint of The Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2023 by Jeff Horwitz.
