New crop of  whistleblowers aren’t interested in fraud, but in purpose

by J. Jennings Moss

Originally published Oct. 29, 2021 in the Silicon Valley Business Journal.

Chances are, before this week, you’d never heard the name Frances Haugen. A data engineer who worked at Google, Yelp and Pinterest before Facebook recruited her in 2018, Haugen can now lay claim to being one of the biggest corporate whistleblowers ever.

Haugen squirreled away thousands of pages of internal Facebook documents and gave them to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Redacted versions of what are now called the Facebook Papers made their way to congressional committees, the Wall Street Journal and a consortium of other media outlets whose reporters have been deciphering and sharing them with the rest of us.

A quick summary of what Haugen’s infodump brought to light: Facebook, the company that CEO Mark Zuckerberg created out of his dorm room in Harvard as a way to connect college students, is now a corporate giant far more interested in profits and market dominance than it is about the societal dangers its platform has created.

Haugen is just the latest private-sector employee who has stepped up to say “all is not well inside corporate HQ.” The last few years have seen a number of employees in some of Silicon Valley’s most prominent companies either step forward publicly or mount aggressive internal challenges to their corporate bosses.

Recently, the Silicon Valley Business Journal told the stories of two such employees — Janneke Parrish, an Austin-based program manager at Apple, and B. Pagels-Minor, who worked for Netflix at its Los Gatos headquarters. Both Parrish and Pagels-Minor lost their jobs as a direct result of their activism, although the reasons for their firings were rooted in technicalities rather than the subject matter of their criticism.

Earlier this year saw Google fire Margaret Mitchell, the founder of its artificial intelligence ethics unit, under similar circumstances. It wasn’t because she spoke out against censorship inside the company or in favor of greater employee diversity, but because she violated Google’s code of conduct by taking internal files outside the Mountain View-based search giant.

Haugen avoided any disciplinary action by taking the files and leaving Facebook before it could oust her. An early cryptocurrency investor, she’s now in Puerto Rico.

What’s different about all of these cases is the point of the whistleblowing. Where in the past, employees usually spoke out against illegal and fraudulent acts taking place inside their workplaces — think about the downfall of the now-defunct energy company Enron, where one of its vice presidents wrote an infamous memo to the CEO warning about accounting fraud and corruption — this new crop of whistleblowers are getting at something deeper.

In all of these cases, the employees are trying to hold their companies to account for their actions and policies. What the companies are doing may not be illegal, but they are unethical, immoral and go against the stated principles that the companies themselves have espoused. The companies are putting profits over people — whether those people are customers or employees — and a few workers have had enough.

The problem for Facebook, Netflix, Apple, Google and others of their ilk is that this is absolutely the worst time to have their secrets exposed. Lawmakers in Washington, D.C., in a rare show of bipartisanship, seem eager to impose new regulations on Big Tech or go so far as to break up these companies.

These new whistleblowers say they don’t want to destroy their companies. Haugen herself, on the last day of work, reportedly left this message on her computer: “I love Facebook. I want to save it.”

But for those in the C-Suite, that’s probably not the message they’re hearing. Instead, in keeping with the spirit of this Halloween season, you can almost picture Mark Zuckerberg picking up a phone only to hear a creepy voice: “The leaks are coming from inside your office.”