Facebook Whistleblower Reveals Her Identity, Claims Company Is 'Causing Ethnic Violence Around the World'
A former Facebook employee-turned-whistleblower has finally come forward.
The night before a worldwide crash caused Facebook and its family of apps to go offline on Monday, former Facebook product manager Frances Haugen revealed her identity on 60 Minutes to discuss why she recently leaked the company's internal documents to lawmakers and the Wall Street Journal.
The documents led to a WSJ series that alleged Facebook allowed the accounts of high-profile users to bypass its rules, allowing some to post material meant to incite violence or harass others; downplayed data that showed Instagram is harmful to young teens, namely girls; and made changes to its algorithm that made people "angrier," among other allegations.
For more on Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen revealing her identity and other top stories, listen below to our daily podcast PEOPLE Every Day.
Representatives for Facebook did not immediately respond to PEOPLE's request for comment.
"The thing I saw at Facebook over and over again was there were conflicts of interest between what was good for the public and what was good for Facebook. And Facebook, over and over again, chose to optimize for its own interests, like making more money," Haugen, 37, said in the 60 Minutes interview, which aired on Sunday.
RELATED: Facebook Experiencing Worst Outage Since 2008, Instagram and WhatsApp Also Down Worldwide
Robert Fortunato for CBS News/60MINUTES
Before joining Facebook, Haugen earned a degree in computer engineering from the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering and a master's degree in business from Harvard, according to her LinkedIn profile. She also worked for Facebook competitors such as Google, Yelp and Pinterest. After joining Facebook in June 2019, Haugen left her position in May.
"I've seen a bunch of social networks and it was substantially worse at Facebook than anything I'd seen before," Haugen said on 60 Minutes.
RELATED: Facebook Pauses Work on Kids' Version of Instagram After Report About App's 'Toxic' Effect on Teens
According to Statista, Facebook is the largest social media platform on the planet with over 2.89 billion users. The company was originally founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg and a group of fellow Harvard students including Chris Hughes and Eduardo Saverin.
Today, it is one of the most valuable companies in the world with a market cap of 919.79 billion as of Monday afternoon (the company's stock fell after Haugen's interview and the outage that followed). Aside from its main site, Facebook further increased its reach with the purchases of wildly popular apps Instagram, in 2012, and WhatsApp, in 2014.
"Imagine you know what's going on inside of Facebook and you know no one on the outside knows," Haugen said on 60 Minutes. "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."
RELATED VIDEO: Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg Admits Failure to Protect Users' Data or Stop Russians
RELATED: Children Advocates Tell Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook to Scrap Plans for Kids' Version of Instagram
"When we live in an information environment that is full of angry, hateful, polarizing content it erodes our civic trust, it erodes our faith in each other, it erodes our ability to want to care for each other, the version of Facebook that exists today is tearing our societies apart and causing ethnic violence around the world," she later said in the interview.
Facebook's director of policy communications, Lena Pietsch, responded to CBS News with several statements regarding Haugen's allegations.
"Every day our teams have to balance protecting the right of billions of people to express themselves openly with the need to keep our platform a safe and positive place," Pietsch said, in part. "We continue to make significant improvements to tackle the spread of misinformation and harmful content. To suggest we encourage bad content and do nothing is just not true."
While speaking with 60 Minutes, Haugen said she empathized with Facebook CEO Zuckerberg for what the platform has grown into.
"I have a lot of empathy for Mark. and Mark has never set out to make a hateful platform," she said. "But he has allowed choices to be made where the side effects of those choices are that hateful, polarizing content gets more distribution and more reach."
