https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/24/business/media/facebook-leak-frances-haugen.html

THE MEDIA EQUATION

Inside the Big Facebook Leak

By Ben Smith Oct. 24, 2021Updated 8:55 p.m. ET

Frances Haugen first met Jeff Horwitz, a tech-industry reporter for The Wall Street Journal, early last December on a hiking trail near the Chabot Space & Science Center in Oakland, Calif.

She liked that he seemed thoughtful, and she liked that he’d written about Facebook’s role in transmitting violent Hindu nationalism in India, a particular interest of hers. She also got the impression that he would support her as a person, rather than as a mere source who could supply him with the inside information she had picked up during her nearly two years as a product manager at Facebook.

“I auditioned Jeff for a while,” Ms. Haugen told me in a phone interview from her home in Puerto Rico, “and one of the reason I went with him is that he was less sensationalistic than other choices I could have made.”

She became one of the greatest sources of the century, turning over the tens of thousands of pages of internal documents she had collected. Starting Sept. 13, The Journal justified her confidence with a meticulous rollout that included 11 major articles by Mr. Horwitz and other reporters cleverly packaged under a catchy rubric, The Facebook Files.

Key revelations included how Facebook executives handled politicized lies, including Donald J. Trump’s claims of election fraud. Often, the company chose to let misinformation spread widely, to keep more people logging on. The series also noted the lengths that Facebook went to in its desperation to hang on to its audience as young people drifted away from its platforms.

The Journal also produced a podcast episode introducing Ms. Haugen as poised, incisive and intensely moral, a depiction that Mr. Horwitz told me he agrees with after much reporting, but which also amounted to white-glove treatment of a treasured source.

So there was an uncomfortable moment on Oct. 7, when a communications firm working with Ms. Haugen invited Mr. Horwitz and two of his editors to a Zoom call with a group that would grow to include journalists from 17 other U.S. media outlets.

On the call, Ms. Haugen offered to share redacted versions of the trove of Facebook documents under an embargo to be set by the group. The firm, which was founded by the former Barack Obama aide Bill Burton, would help manage the process. After she made her pitch, Mr. Horwitz and his colleagues found themselves in a strange position: The source who had provided them with the stuff of so many exclusive scoops now seemed to be going rogue.

“This is a little awkward,” Jason Dean, an editor at The Journal, said on the call, according to three participants....

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/24/business/media/facebook-leak-frances-haugen.html