Data scientist Frances Haugen handed over thousands of internal Facebook documents to the Wall Street Journal in 2021. From those documents it emerged that the company knew perfectly well what damage its platforms (including Instagram) were causing to users’ safety and mental health, but chose not to intervene. Solving those critical issues, in fact, would have led to a reduction in the time people spent on apps. The files stolen by Haugen ended up at the center of thousands of lawsuits on the damage caused to young people, proceedings which forced Meta to shell out billions of dollars and to review some features of its social networks. Today, five years after the release of those documents, it is legitimate to ask whether that same algorithm at the center of the investigation, which rewarded anger and polarization, still works in the same way.
It is precisely this enormous scandal that is at the heart of The Social – The price of truth. Sixteen years later The Social Networkdirector Aaron Sorkin returns to shine the spotlight on Mark Zuckerberg’s company, bringing the figure of Frances Haugen and the consequences of her revelations to the big screen.
What was in the documents: The Facebook Files
Frances Haugen was part of Facebook’s Civic Integrity team, the group responsible for identifying and stemming misinformation on the platform, with particular attention to that which circulated during the elections. When the company disbanded that group, she decided to leave, taking with her pages and pages of internal research to give to reporter Jeff Horwitz of the Wall Street Journal, which would later become a series of investigations known as The Facebook Files.
Haugen later filed a complaint with the SEC, the American securities regulator, and testified before the US Senate, declaring that “Facebook’s products harm children, fuel divisions and weaken our democracy. The company’s leaders know how to make Facebook and Instagram safer, but they are not making the necessary changes because they have put their astronomical profits before people”. Furthermore, in his speech, Haugen specified that the documents provided to Congress “prove that Facebook has repeatedly misled the public about what its own research reveals about the safety of children, the effectiveness of its artificial intelligence systems, and its role in spreading divisive and extreme messages.”
As can be read in the survey, “32% of teenagers said that, when they felt dissatisfied with their body, Instagram made them feel even worse”. This is what emerged in a presentation from March 2020, published on the company’s internal bulletin board and viewed by the WSJ. In the same period, the article says, Instagram’s internal researchers were studying experiences of this type, wondering if they were part of a larger phenomenon, understanding in short how Instagram was “harmful for a significant percentage of these users, especially for teenage girls”.
Furthermore, internal research commissioned by the company had documented that the automatic systems intercepted, according to the estimates cited by Haugen, only 3-5% of hateful content and just 0.6% in the case of violent content or content that incited violence. For Haugen the crux lies in the algorithm introduced by Facebook in 2018, built to push engagement and to give priority to Meaningful Social Interactions, i.e. significant social interactions, with the aim of encouraging real exchanges between friends and family on the platform. The result was the opposite because the algorithm instead rewarded content capable of generating anger, hostility, comments and reactions, an element confirmed by the researchers in some internal memos, which read that “misinformation, toxicity and violent content are disproportionately widespread among reshares”.
The Washington Post, working on the same documents, then revealed that every emotional reaction, present among the ways of reacting to a post, including the angry smiley, was worth five times a like, and that already in 2019 Facebook’s internal researchers had verified how “posts capable of eliciting angry reactions through emojis had a disproportionately high probability of containing misinformation, toxic content and low-quality news”.
What Meta changed on Instagram and Facebook
The reputational damage for Facebook was so profound that the company chose to rename itself Meta. There has been little progress over time regarding the role of the algorithm in amplifying fake news and pushing users towards increasingly extreme political positions. At the beginning of 2025, the company announced the closure of the fact-checking program entrusted to third parties in the United States, replaced by a system of Community Notes written by users on the model of Facebook, Instagram and Threads”.
Meta then recently presented new tools based on artificial intelligence that allow you to tell the platform which contents you want to see in the Feed and in the Reels, a function called “Your Algorithm”. In the release, the company explains that its ranking systems infer interests from what people interact with, from commented posts to videos watched, among thousands of other signals.
At the same time, Frances Haugen’s documents have become evidentiary material in over 2,400 lawsuits against Meta, TikTok and YouTube, accused of designing their apps to create addiction in minors. The first verdict arrived in March 2026 in Los Angeles, in which Meta and Google were sentenced to compensate a twenty-year-old, known as KGM, with a total of 6 million dollars, who attributed years of anxiety, depression and body dysmorphia to the use of Instagram and YouTube since childhood. The most substantial lawsuit, however, ended in August with an agreement, in which Meta agreed to pay around 18 billion dollars to 48 American states that from 2023 accused it of making Facebook and Instagram addictive for children, hiding what it knew about the damage to their mental health.
In 2024, Meta introduced accounts for teenagers on Instagram and, following the agreement reached at the end of August 2026, Zuckerberg’s company agreed to introduce stricter constraints and strengthen the protections reserved for minors on Instagram and Facebook in the United States. The new limitations include a total of 2 hours of use per day, a block from midnight to 6 am, silenced notifications during school hours and more control tools for parents. The experience of using apps also changes. For example, on teenagers’ accounts the count of likes and reactions will be hidden and the agreement also introduces a ban, for minors, on filters that reproduce the effects of surgical retouching or make-up that transforms the features.
These new protections, however, do not concern Italy. Here, the security settings that limit contact and inappropriate content remain valid and include private accounts, message restrictions, reminders to exit the app after 60 minutes of daily use and turning off notifications between 10pm and 7am.
Haugen, interviewed by Fortune at the time of the film’s release, said she hadn’t seen any cultural changes that would show the company had turned a corner, and said she believes the real solution is to design more secure systems from the start, not simply try to clean them up at the end.
