In April, several months before a Facebook employee named Frances Haugen became the most famous whistleblower in the company’s history, The Guardian’s Julia Carrie Wong published a series of damning stories about Facebook. Wong’s pieces described how Facebook ignored the spread of disinformation and harassment in countries such as Azerbaijan and Honduras, where authoritarian leaders artificially inflated their popularity ahead of elections and journalists were targeted by bot accounts. Wong’s source was Sophie Zhang, a former data analyst at Facebook, whom she’d met a few years prior. Zhang trusted her with a trove of documents extensively detailing the company’s misdeeds—Facebook papers that were well ahead of Haugen’s, though they didn’t land with nearly as much impact.
[…]
Source: A tale of two Facebook leaks | Columbia Journalism Review