Frances Haugen (Hachette)
We all owe a debt of thanks to Frances Haugen, the Facebook whistleblower, who, in September 2021, released a bombshell cache of documents that explained just how the social network picked over our data, and, in the process, divided and riled us.
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Haugen’s decision validated long-held suppositions that the tech titan had been able to deny for lack of evidence. Here, for the first time, was proof of the platform’s pernicious effects – for example, that it had a relatively low performance in tackling hate speech, and that 13.5 per cent of teenage girls surveyed in the US and the UK said that Instagram made their suicidal thoughts worse, while 17 per cent said the photo app made their eating disorders worse.
It is no surprise that Haugen’s book on her experience, The Power of One, has been among the most anticipated of this year’s titles.
Many will pick up Haugen’s book to learn more about how she came to decide to blow the whistle on the world’s largest social media platform and what she sees as its malpractices. They will want to learn about how she secreted away her 22,000 pages of Facebook documents, and the things that were hidden in plain sight within them.
We get some of that in her book, although it is often embedded within or sandwiched between meandering memories of Mrs Muhly, her school mathematics teacher, giving her B-pluses for algebra.
Sometimes, the links between Haugen’s childhood and the actions she would take as an adult about Facebook are clear: she draws a logical, plausible connection between her meticulous preparation for high-school debates and how she surreptitiously photographed, then stored, the 22,000 pages in carefully described digital folders. But at other times they seem tenuous and, at their most plodding, little more than filler.
The thinking behind including 160 pages of biography seems obvious. The clue is in the title: The Power of One. Hundreds of thousands of Facebook employees have walked through the headquarters of Facebook, now Meta, at 1 Hacker Way in Menlo Park, California.
The vast majority of those employees had chosen not to speak publicly about what Haugen alleges was an open secret within the firm: its negative impacts on our lives, which she has since explained to multiple hearings before US Congress and countless journalists. But she did. “Imagine if we all realised the power of one,” she writes. “What world could we build together if more people woke up to their own power?”
To understand why she was different from the rest, the thinking goes, we need to learn more about her. Yet the thing that brought her into the public eye – her willingness to go public when others refused – is buried in the back half of the book.
The first chapter hints at the drama. Haugen is feted at President Joe Biden’s 2022 state of the union address for her actions. She outlines the turmoil in deciding to go public. The reader is raring to learn about the tribulations involved in taking on a company that some argue is bigger than many governments. And then we slip sleepily into Iowa in the early 2000s.
If you make it through those 160 pages, the revelations are rich once Haugen has arrived at Facebook. But, truthfully, it is tough going to get there. Even when you are swept along by the drama, there is a tendency to get bogged down in tech speak. “Narrowcast misinformation targeted at leaders likely would take different forms” is a particularly dull way to begin a description of how the Facebook algorithm fed Russian propaganda to the people running Facebook community groups, swaying their opinions of the world.
This happens often. You are geared up for a revelation, then an extraordinarily awkward phrase stalls the momentum. History shouldn’t forget Haugen, but, with regret, her book is pretty forgettable.
