Frances Haugen Says Meta can't Recover Until Mark Zuckerberg Steps Down

Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen believes the company will not be able to recover until Mark Zuckerberg resigns as CEO. She explained why she decided to go public after leaving the company in May 2021 in an interview with Bloomberg.

Haugen seized tens of thousands of pages of documents showing that Facebook knew its products were harming teenagers' mental health, inciting ethnic violence in countries like Ethiopia, and failing to control misinformation prior to the January 6 riots in Washington, DC.

She told Bloomberg that Zuckerberg "genuinely believes that Facebook is just a mirror" of reality, and that "you are unhappy because you can see it now." She said, "Mark has been surrounded by people since he was 19 years old who told him he was doing a great job. We can demonize Zuckerberg, but it's not going to make him heal faster."

Unlike most other public companies, Zuckerberg owns 56 percent of the voting rights, according to Haugen. "No one, but Mark Zuckerberg can control Facebook right now."

Haugen discussed a tweak to Facebook's algorithm in 2018 that aimed to elicit reactions from users rather than simply increasing dwell time. "It's not good unless we can get a reaction from you," she added.