Facebook Whistleblower Comes Forward, Stock Plummets and Zuckerberg Loses Billions

Facebook Whistleblower Comes Forward, Stock Plummets and Zuckerberg Loses Billions


It’s a bad day for Mark Zuckerberg’s billion dollar empire as ethics has caught up to him. “The stock slide on Monday sent Zuckerberg’s worth down to $121.6 billion, dropping him below Bill Gates to No. 5 on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. He’s down from almost $140 billion in a matter of weeks, according to the index” reports Bloomberg.

A selloff is what sent the “social-media giant’s stock plummeting 4.9% on Monday, adding to a drop of about 15% since mid-September” adds Bloomberg. The sellof occurred “after a whistleblower came forward and outages took Facebook Inc.’s flagship products offline.”

Zuckerberg’s personal wealth has fallen by over $6 billion in only a few hours. Last week Charlie Kirk reported on “The Facebook Files” an investigative series by The Wall Street Journal, which unearthed leaked internal documents from the company.

The documents show internal research proved social media such as Instagram is toxic for teenage girls. Regardless, they were developing an “Instagram for Kids” program. Additionally, it was discovered that Facebook had formed a special team to figure out how children and teens could be monetized. The age group was determined a “valuable but untapped audience.”

The whistleblower identified herself on Monday, after the wall Street Journal began publishing the series on September 13. Speaking to 60 Minutes’ Scott Pelley, Frances Haugen explicitly details how during her time with Facebook she saw “conflicts of interest between what was good for the public and what was good for Facebook.”

Haugen, 37, is a data scientist from Iowa “with a degree in computer engineering and a Harvard master’s degree in business.” She has worked for companies including Google and Pinterest and told 60 Minutes, “I’ve seen a bunch of social networks and it was substantially worse at Facebook than anything I’d seen before.”

Additionally she said, “Imagine you know what’s going on inside of Facebook and you know no one on the outside knows. I knew what my future looked like if I continued to stay inside of Facebook, which is person after person after person has tackled this inside of Facebook and ground themselves to the ground.”

“At some point in 2021, I realized, ‘Okay, I’m gonna have to do this in a systemic way, and I have to get out enough that no one can question that this is real.”

Therefore Haugen secretly copied “tens of thousands of pages of Facebook internal research. She says evidence shows that the company is lying to the public about making significant progress against hate, violence and misinformation.”


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