Frances Haugen takes on Facebook: the making of a modern US hero

In her explosive Senate testimony, the former employee exposed how the tech giant puts profit before the public good

The journey from disillusioned ex-employee to modern-day heroine took Frances Haugen less than five months. The 37-year-old logged out of Facebook's company network for the last time in May and last week was being publicly lauded a 21st-century American hero" on Washington's Capitol Hill.

That journey was paved with tens of thousands of internal documents, taken from Facebook's internal system by Haugen, that formed the backbone of a series of damning revelations first published in the Wall Street Journal last month. They revealed that Facebook knew its products were damaging the mental health of teenage girls, resisted changes that would make the content of its main platform less divisive and knew its main platform was being used to incite ethnic violence in Ethiopia.