Haugen joined Facebook out of a desire to help it address misinformation and other threats to democracy. But her frustration grew as she learned of online misinformation that stoked violence and abuse — and which Facebook wasn't addressing effectively.with a trove of Facebook documents that cataloged how her former employer was failing to protect young users from body-image issues and amplifying online hate and extremism.
Haugen was well-positioned to unleash her bombshell. As a graduate business student at Harvard, she helped create an online dating platform that eventually turned into the dating app Hinge. At Google, she helped to make thousands of books accessible on mobile phones and to create a fledgling social network. Haugen’s creative restlessness flipped her through several jobs over 15 years at Google, Yelp, Pinterest and of course Facebook, which recruited her in 2018.
But she brought intellectual heft that packed a political punch. Khan shook up the antitrust world in 2017 with her scholarly work as a Yale law student, “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox,” which helped shape a new way of looking at antitrust law. In Khan's aggressive investigations and enforcement agenda, key priorities include racial bias in algorithms and market-power abuses by dominant tech companies. Internally, some employees have chafed at administrative changes that expanded Khan’s authority over policymaking, and one Republican commissioner has assailed Khan in public.