Washington- The Facebook whistleblower who will testify in congress this week was born and raised in Iowa City.
Radio Iowa reports that Francis Haugen, a former data scientist at Facebook, kept her identity a secret when she filed a complaint with the Securities and Exchange Commission against Facebook and shared internal Facebook documents with The Wall Street Journal.
Haugen was revealed as the whistleblower during a report on “60 Minutes” and Haugen said she’ll testify to congress that Facebook has deceived regulators and the public about its monitoring of hate speech and misinformation. She said on “60 Minutes” that Facebook is choosing profit over safety.
Haugen is a 2002 graduate of Iowa City West High School and her website says her parents are professors. Haugen has an electrical engineering degree from Olin College and an MBA from Harvard. She worked at Google and Yelp before she was hired at Facebook in 2019. She resigned from Facebook in May of this year.
A spokesman for Facebook told CNN that the social media platform reflects the good, the bad and the ugly of humanity and Facebook is trying to amiplify the good and mitigate the bad.
