Being Right Isn’t Enough

What do you do when being right isn’t enough to change what’s wrong?

You speak up. You make your case. You show people the evidence. But what happens when they believe you – and still don’t act? What do you do then?

Frances Haugen knows this dilemma better than most. Five years ago, she was a data scientist at Facebook who became convinced the company was dismissing serious dangers that its own researchers had discovered. So she copied thousands of pages of internal documents, gave them to journalists and regulators, and eventually revealed herself as the whistleblower behind what became known as the Facebook Files.

This week, her story is getting the full Aaron Sorkin treatment in The Social Reckoning, a follow-up to The Social Network based on Haugen’s memoir, The Power of One. Sure enough, the movie is a classic Hollywood story about one brave person taking on a big, powerful corporation.

But the more I’ve thought about Haugen’s story, the more I’ve realized that the Hollywood version leaves out the most important part: Facebook’s problem wasn’t that no one inside the company knew anything was wrong. They knew a lot. Their own researchers knew that Instagram could harm teenage girls who struggle with body image issues. Their own employees warned that Facebook’s algorithm was poisoning our political climate and fueling hate speech and violence in other countries. These people knew the risks. They knew the dangers. They had the evidence.