Hey everyone, it's Tristan. Real quick before we dive in, the audio quality in this episode

wasn't quite as good as we'd want it to be, but we wanted to prioritize getting it to you sooner

rather than later, because it's the Facebook whistleblower. Indeed, we got the opportunity

to speak with Frances Haagen herself. And if all that sounds exciting to you and you're an audio

producer, we're actually looking for a senior producer for this show, You're Undivided Attention.

We're especially interested in candidates who are aligned with our mission, which is why we're

sharing this opportunity with you, our listeners. So please apply or share the role with someone

who might. Visit humaintec.com slash careers. And with that, here we go.

I joined Facebook because I had a very close friend who helped me relearn to walk when I got

really sick back in, you know, 2015, 2016, who got radicalized on the internet.

And so the issue of misinformation and the quality of our information environment was a very personal

issue for me. And once I began working at Facebook, it became apparent to me over time that there

were conflicts of interest between what was in the public's good and the profits of Facebook,

and that Facebook consistently resolved those conflicts by prioritizing profits over people.

And at some point, I realized the only real path for it, the only thing that was aligned with

the public good was making sure that the public had the information they needed to make decisions

that were good for themselves. That's Francis Hagen. She's a specialist in algorithmic product

management. She worked on ranking algorithms at Google, Pinterest, and Yelp, and was even a co-founder

of a popular dating app called Hinch. She was then recruited to Facebook to be a product manager

on civic misinformation and then worked on counter-espionage. But what she saw at Facebook was that

the company was consistently and knowingly prioritizing profits over public safety. And so Francis

made the courageous decision to blow the whistle, which resulted in the biggest disclosure in the history

...