Frances Haugen is appearing in front of the US Senate to testify about Facebook.
Media reports have indicated that she plans to urge lawmakers to regulate the social media group more tightly.
According to her written statement, she will indicate that Facebook has misled investors about the size of its audience and concealed a years-long decline in younger users in the US.
Her testimony comes at a time when the social network also suffered a significant outage on Monday, with all of its platforms, including WhatsApp and Instagram, going off-line for several hours.
Haugen only revealed herself on Sunday night.
That was when she went on “60 Minutes,” started tweeting, published a personal website, started a GoFundMe and announced a European tour to speak with lawmakers and regulators.
The move was timed ahead of a congressional hearing today, when she will testify in person on Facebook’s impact on young people.
Haugen, 37, is from Iowa City, Iowa, she studied electrical and computer engineering at Olin College and got an MBA from Harvard.
She then worked at various Silicon Valley companies, including Google, Pinterest and Yelp.
In June 2019, she joined Facebook.
There, she handled democracy and misinformation issues, as well as working on counter espionage as part of the civic misinformation team, according to her personal website.
She left Facebook in May with thousands of pages of internal research and documents.
Those documents have formed the basis of a series of Journal articles and a whistle-blower complaint that she and her lawyers have filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Haugen has said she doesn’t hate Facebook and just wants to improve it.
Watch her testimony here:
IOL Tech