Just a few weeks after the 2020 elections in the United States, Jeff Horwitz, then a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, received a private message on his LinkedIn account. On the other side, Frances Haugen, mid-level product manager of Facebook's Civic Integrity Team. "People need to understand what is happening here," she warned him.
Six years after that message, Meta - the parent company of applications like WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook - has agreed to pay 18 billion dollars to settle lawsuits filed by up to 29 U.S. states accusing Mark Zuckerberg's empire of designing its platforms to hook teenagers, deceiving users about their security measures, improperly collecting data from minors, and above all, knowing the harm they were causing... and hiding it. That's exactly what was happening there the day Haugen wrote to Horwitz.
The agreement was made public last week, will apply in 48 states, and commits Meta to review its controls and minors' access time to its tools.
"It is not up to me to say if it is a fair or good agreement, but I will say that some of the most serious accusations made by the states are not behaviors directly addressed by the agreement," warns Horwitz via email from San Francisco. "For example, Meta is not required to modify the operation of its recommendation systems or change how it determines when users are harmed. The attributed harm is addressed more indirectly, only through limits on usage time. And yes, 18 billion dollars is a lot of money... but Meta can easily afford that payment."
Jeff Horwitz is now a technology investigative journalist at Reuters and earlier this year won the Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of all Meta's miseries. The resolution of the trial, which lasted just one week, has sparked a global debate on the responsibility of big tech corporations in the harm caused by the design of their social networks and the real impact the measures Meta commits to applying in the future will have. But above all, it has served to unmask without filters the bad practices that Horwitz began to uncover the day Frances Haugen replied to him on LinkedIn. So let's rewind.
After four years of political investigation in Washington, Horwitz moved to the West Coast of the United States at the end of 2020 to cover information related to Mark Zuckerberg's company. "A job that came with the unpleasant need to pretend to write authoritatively about a company he did not understand," he writes in his book Broken Code (Ariel, 2024).
For months, the journalist contacted former Facebook employees and sent messages to top executives to try to unravel the "black box" of a platform that was already generating all kinds of suspicions for its ability to distort the behavior of its users, spread fake information, or fuel political fanaticism. "The company knew much more than it said about the negative consequences of social media use," believed Horwitz. Frances Haugen confirmed it.
A few days after their first message on LinkedIn, Horwitz and Haugen met on a hiking trail in the hills behind Oakland. They walked through the California redwood forests and ended up seeing each other almost every week eating sushi in the journalist's backyard. "To avoid potential surveillance as much as possible, I bought a cheap Samsung phone in cash and handed it to Haugen, whom I addressed as Sean McCabe," Horwitz recounts.
After many hours of conversations and tens of thousands of confidential documents, on September 13, 2021, the first installment of the so-called Facebook Papers was released, an investigation that for weeks - first in The Wall Street Journal and then through an international media consortium - revealed that Meta was always fully aware of the negative impact its social networks had on users' attention span, political ideas, or mental health, especially on the younger ones, the influence of its platforms on the spread of fake news and hate messages, or its profitable exploitation of polarization worldwide.
On October 3, Haugen publicly revealed her identity as whistleblower and two days later testified before the U.S. Senate. This kicked off a long political and legal process that led to the largest trial against Meta for fueling the social media addiction of millions of children and teenagers. On August 26, just eight days after the start of the trial against Zuckerberg's company in the Northern District of California Federal Court, Meta accepted an agreement without admitting any wrongdoing.
"It is quite common for large multi-state investigations carried out by attorneys general to end in an agreement," acknowledges Horwitz. "Although the timing was quite dramatic."
Meta decided to settle the process right during the testimony of Adam Mosseri, Instagram's director, and just before Mark Zuckerberg had to take the stand.
"18 billion dollars is a lot of money... but Meta can easily afford that payment"
For months, Horwitz had access to Meta's internal investigations and studies, presentations to executives, and employee conversations that allowed him to reconstruct what the company knew about the harm they were causing. For example, that 32% of teenage girls who felt bad about their bodies said Instagram made them feel worse. Or that 13% of British teenagers and 6% of Americans who had suicidal thoughts also attributed them to Instagram. Meta knew that its younger users were the most likely targets of bullies, extortionists, and sexual predators. And they knew that profitable changes in their algorithm could favor polarizing content, misinformation, and posts that generated outrage. Faced with the risk of revenue decline, they made a radical decision: do nothing.
Now, the legal agreement requires Meta to introduce usage limits for minors, nighttime restrictions, or parental controls.
"Facebook even banned any changes to the platform that could harm revenue or reduce daily active users"
Horwitz recounts in Broken Code that Frances Haugen left Facebook on May 17, 2021. That day, the journalist booked a table at a luxury restaurant to celebrate. "I ordered a taxi at 6:30 to take us there, but Haugen was still busy downloading the entire company's organizational chart," he recalls in his book. "Before shutting down the computer, she made one last search on Workplace [Meta's corporate communication platform], assuming it would be the last thing Facebook's Security Team would see in their inevitable forensic analysis. 'I don't hate Facebook —she began—. I love Facebook. I want to save it'. She finished writing, hit enter, and shut down the computer."