In September 2021, The Wall Street Journal published nine reports based on tens of thousands of internal Facebook documents supplied by product manager Frances Haugen. The documents covered alleged preferential treatment for high-profile users through the XCheck system, research on Instagram’s effects on teenagers, algorithm changes made in 2018, vaccine and election misinformation, and Facebook’s response to human trafficking, drug cartels, and ethnic violence. Haugen publicly identified herself on 60 Minutes on October 3, 2021, and testified before the U.S. Senate Commerce subcommittee on October 5. She alleged that Facebook leadership, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg, repeatedly chose engagement and revenue over public safety and knew that weak integrity systems could worsen harms in countries including Myanmar and Ethiopia.
Haugen’s lawyers filed at least eight complaints with the Securities and Exchange Commission, alleging that Facebook misled investors about its handling of hate speech, misinformation, political content, COVID-19 claims, and climate misinformation; the legal merits remained unresolved in the supplied account. On November 12, 2021, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost sued Meta on behalf of investors, seeking more than $100 billion and corporate reforms, while a bipartisan coalition of state attorneys general opened a consumer-protection investigation focused on Instagram and alleged harms to children. Facebook’s market capitalization fell about $6 billion within 24 hours of Haugen’s interview and a major October 4 outage. Her disclosures also helped drive international scrutiny culminating in the European Union’s Digital Services Act, which entered into force in 2022 and imposed transparency and systemic-risk obligations on major platforms.
