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You might have noticed that this was a really, really bad week for Facebook.

First, there was this whistleblower from Inside the Company. She leaked all of these

damning documents and then went to testify about them in Congress. She basically said that Facebook

is damaging to society. I'm here today because I believe Facebook's products harm children,

stoke division, and weaken our democracy. There was also this outage. For hours on Monday,

people around the world could not use Facebook, or Instagram, or WhatsApp. And for some people,

this was mildly annoying, but for so many others, this was a huge disruption to their business or

their ability to communicate with their family. Facebook has not said how many people have been

affected in the outage, which began just before noon Eastern time, but its platforms altogether

have billions of users worldwide. And now it seems like we're all struggling with this tension.

We keep hearing over and over again that Facebook is dangerous in so many different ways,

that it's bad for democracy, that it's bad for our mental health. A lot of us are thinking about

quitting. But we can't seem to live without it for even a couple of hours. So what do we do?

From the newsroom of the Washington Post, this is Post Reports. I'm Martin Powers. It's Friday,

October 8. I saw Facebook repeatedly encounter conflicts between its own profits and our safety.

Facebook consistently resolved these conflicts in favor of its own profits.

That's Frances Hagen, the whistleblower who testified before Congress this week. And she's

downloaded not just some documents, but tens of thousands of documents that she says exposed that

Facebook continuously withheld information from the public that showed how its products,

...