Psychology Today | 08.10.2026 22:27
I knew who Frances Haugen was the moment she blew the whistle on Facebook (now Meta) by leaking tens of thousands of pages of internal documents to a Wall Street Journal reporter. I’m a former movie executive turned developmental psychologist who studies media and teens. The documents she released revealed that Instagram’s own researchers knew that teenage girls felt the platform was harming their body image. That research was highly relevant to my field, so like a well-trained scientist, I went straight to the underlying materials, which had been presented to Facebook executives in the form of a slide deck. After reading it, I felt convinced that the conclusions being drawn went far beyond what the data could establish.
