Frances Haugen sat at a kitchen table in Puerto Rico and opened her phone over her laptop screen.
She was thirty-six. She had a doctorate from Harvard Business School and a decade of work at Google, Pinterest, and Yelp behind her. She had joined Facebook in June 2019 to work on the civic integrity team, the small group inside the company tasked with keeping elections and democratic discourse from being torn apart by the algorithms the rest of the company was building. She had taken the job because she wanted the job. She believed the work mattered. She believed the company was serious about it.
The civic integrity team was dissolved after the 2020 election.
She kept working. She watched what happened on January 6, 2021. She read the internal research that landed in her inbox in the months that followed. The research said, in plain language, that the company knew what its products were doing to teenage girls. The research said the company had run the studies itself. The research said the studies had not changed the products.
The company was working from home because of the pandemic. The internal posts she was reading sat on a system called Workplace, the company's internal social network, accessible to a large share of its employees. She could not download the files. Downloads left fingerprints. Screenshots left fingerprints. So she held her phone up over her laptop and took a picture of the screen. Then she scrolled. Then she took another picture. Then another.
By the time she stopped, she had tens of thousands of documents.
She gave them to The Wall Street Journal. The first story ran on September 13, 2021. She gave them to the Securities and Exchange Commission. She gave them to members of Congress. On October 3, 2021, she sat down with Scott Pelley on 60 Minutes and put her face on the record.
She was not the first person inside the company to read those documents. She was the first person to decide they had to leave the building.
This is a book about why.
The easy version of the story is that Frances Haugen exposed Mark Zuckerberg. That version is wrong, and it is wrong in a way that matters. Frances Haugen did not expose a man. She exposed a system. The system has a man inside it. The system has several thousand engineers inside it. The system has a board of directors and a finance team and a policy team and a legal department. The system has Frances Haugen inside it, until April 2021, when she resigned.
The system also has, sitting on top of all of that, the people who actually own the company.
Mark Zuckerberg owns about thirteen percent of Meta's stock. He is the largest single individual shareholder. He is also not the largest owner of the company. The largest owners of Meta, taken together, are institutional investors. Vanguard Group holds roughly nine percent. BlackRock holds roughly eight. Fidelity holds another six. State Street holds four. Add them up and the four largest institutional shareholders, together, own more than twice what the founder owns.
Those four firms are not, themselves, the ultimate owners. They are intermediaries. They manage money on behalf of someone else. They manage the money inside pension funds, retirement accounts, 401(k) plans, IRAs, and the index funds that sit inside almost every American's workplace retirement plan.
The largest public pension fund in the United States is the California Public Employees Retirement System, headquartered in Sacramento. CalPERS manages the retirement savings of roughly two million Californians: teachers, firefighters, sanitation workers, prison guards, school administrators, the people who keep the state running. CalPERS holds Meta stock. So does the Los Angeles Fire and Police Pensions fund. So does the New York State Common Retirement Fund. So does the Florida Retirement System. So does the Texas Teacher Retirement System. So does every major American public pension plan that holds a broad equity index, which is to say, all of them.
If you have a 401(k), there is a very good chance you own a slice of Meta. If your parents have a pension, there is a very good chance they own a slice. If your kids' teachers are working toward a retirement, there is a very good chance that retirement is partially funded by the company whose products are showing your kids the algorithm Frances Haugen was reading research about in the spring of 2021.
You did not choose this. The trustee of your pension fund did not choose it either, exactly. The trustee was given a return target and a fiduciary obligation. The trustee allocated a percentage of the fund to broad US equity. Broad US equity meant the S&P 500. The S&P 500 meant Meta, because Meta is one of the largest companies in the country by market capitalization. The trustee made a choice. The choice was the only choice the structure made available.
This is the part of the story Frances Haugen could not tell from inside the company. She could only tell you what the company knew. She could not tell you why the company kept doing it anyway. The why is not inside the company. The why is upstream.
There is a teenager in this story too. The Wall Street Journal called her, and the thousands of teenagers like her, the subject of the research. The research called them users. Their parents called them, when they used the word at all, their daughter.
Pick one. A fourteen-year-old girl in Ohio. A bedroom on a Tuesday night. School the next morning. Phone in her hand. The phone is showing her Instagram, which is owned by Meta, which is owned by the institutional investors, which are managing the retirement money of the parents downstairs.
She has been scrolling for an hour. She started on a fitness account. The algorithm noticed she paused on a video about a specific kind of exercise. It served her another one. She paused longer. The algorithm served her three more. By the fourth video, the content had shifted from exercise to body. By the eighth, the content had shifted from body to weight. By the fifteenth, she was watching videos made by other fourteen-year-old girls about how to eat less.
She did not search for any of this. She did not ask for any of this. The algorithm watched what held her attention and gave her more of it, and what held her attention was the thing that was, slowly, making her hate her own body.
Meta knew. The research Frances Haugen carried out of the building contained, among other things, an internal slide from March 2020 reporting that thirty-two percent of teenage girls who already felt bad about their bodies felt worse after using Instagram. Another internal study found that among teenagers who had reported suicidal thoughts, thirteen percent of British users and six percent of American users traced those thoughts to the app. Another found that one in three teenage girls with body image issues said Instagram made the issue worse. Another found that fourteen percent of American teenage boys reported that Instagram made them feel worse about themselves.
The research was internal. The company never published it. The company never gave it to the academics who asked for it. The company kept building products around the engagement metrics the research said were causing the harm, because the engagement metrics were what the business model required, because the business model was what the shareholders required, because the shareholders included the four largest institutional asset managers in the United States, who were managing money on behalf of pension funds, who were managing money on behalf of the girl's mother, who at that moment was downstairs in the kitchen, finishing the dishes, not knowing that her retirement was an owner of the company her daughter was being slowly hurt by upstairs.
These are three rooms.
In the first room, a thirty-six-year-old woman is holding her phone over her laptop and taking pictures of a screen.
In the second room, in Sacramento, a pension trustee is reading a quarterly portfolio report, looking at the line item for US equity, checking the return against the target.
In the third room, a fourteen-year-old girl is on her bed, scrolling.
The three people in these three rooms have never met each other. They will never meet each other. None of them, individually, is the villain of this book. The pension trustee is doing his job, which is to meet the return target the law requires him to meet. The girl is doing what fourteen-year-olds do, which is look at her phone. Frances Haugen, in her room, is doing the only thing she can think to do that might change anything.
The man whose name everyone reaches for, the one Frances Haugen worked for, the one Congress called in to testify, the one who appears on Joe Rogan and seems, in the easy version of the story, like the guy you would point at: he is a person trying to run a public company on behalf of shareholders the law requires him to serve. If he refused to maximize returns, the shareholders would replace him with someone who would. If they could not replace him, they could sue him. If he resigned tomorrow and a saint took the chair, the saint would face the same fiduciary pressure to keep the engagement metrics climbing, because the engagement metrics are what the share price tracks, because the share price is what the shareholders are paid to care about.
There is no room in this system marked the bad guy.
There is just the system. And the system is running.
The rest of this book is a tour of the rooms.
Some of them you have heard of. The hearings on Capitol Hill. The lawsuits in California and Texas. The trade associations that file the lawsuits. The chief executives who testify. Some of them you have not heard of. The pension boards. The asset managers. The proxy votes. The retirement-account architecture that, beginning quietly in the 1970s, made every working American a passive part-owner of the companies their children would, decades later, be subjected to.
The point of the tour is not to find someone to blame. The point of the tour is to show you the map. The map is the thing that has been hidden, not because anyone hid it on purpose, but because no one person was ever in a position to see all of it at once. Frances Haugen saw one room. The pension trustee in Sacramento sees another. The girl in Ohio sees a screen.
This book is the map.
The next chapter starts where the money does.
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This is one chapter from You Own This. The full book is coming soon. The research behind it continues every Thursday night, free, in the weekly briefing and the weekly newsletter.