The ‘Facebook whistleblower’ who appeared before a Senate subcommittee yesterday is probably not all she appears to be.
On Monday, The Washington Free Beacon reported the following:
The Facebook whistleblower who revealed herself in a 60 Minutes interview is getting strategic communications guidance from a top Democratic operative, according to a source with direct knowledge of the relationship, which was confirmed by another half-dozen sources with indirect knowledge of the partnership.
Frances Haugen, the former Facebook employee who has for the past 10 months fed internal documents to a top Wall Street Journal reporter, and who revealed her identity in a primetime broadcast on Sunday, is working with the political consultant and former Obama administration deputy press secretary Bill Burton and his consulting firm, Bryson Gillette. It is unclear when Haugen’s relationship with Burton and Bryson Gillette began, how big her communications team is, and whether it includes other political operatives.
…Burton’s involvement helping to manage Haugen’s public debut suggests that her argument is part of a broader Democratic initiative. A Facebook employee in the company’s now-defunct “civic integrity” division until May, Haugen is calling for the federal government to intervene against the company. Though she did not specify in the Sunday interview what sorts of regulations she might support, she is likely to be pressed on that when she appears on Capitol Hill on Tuesday.
Burton himself has also been an outspoken Facebook critic, likening them to tobacco companies that knowingly poisoned people and concealed the health risks of using their products — an analogy Haugen is expected to use in her congressional testimony.
The article also notes:
Now a public affairs consultant, Burton, the founder of the Democratic super PAC Priorities USA Action, also serves on the board of the Center for Humane Technology, a nonprofit organization founded in 2018 that has pit itself against technology companies like Facebook, arguing that they are incentivized to stoke outrage and polarization at the cost of human well-being. The organization produced the 2020 Netflix documentary “The Social Dilemma,” which explores the deleterious influence of social media on its users. Bryson Gillette has done communications work for the Center for Human Technology, according to an event agenda posted online by PR News in which Burton is expected to discuss his work to create a “cultural awakening around the impacts of social media on democracy and our daily lives.”
Haugen echoed that message on 60 Minutes, telling CBS’s Scott Pelley that because Facebook “can be hacked with anger, it’s easier to provoke people into anger.” She continued, “And publishers are saying, ‘Oh, if I do more angry, polarizing, divisive content, I get more money.’ Facebook has set up a system of incentives that is pulling people apart.”
The Center for Humane Technology’s “key advisers” also include Facebook cofounder and former New Republic owner Chris Hughes and is funded by left-wing charitable organizations including George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, the Ford Foundation, and the Robert Wood Johnson foundation.
Do you trust anyone who has even a loose connection with a George-Soros-funded organization.
So what is this testimony ultimately about? It will pave the way for more government control of speech and the eventual denial of a platform for conservative speech. Frances Haugen’s testimony is one of the opening salvos in the war against free speech.