A tale of two Facebook leaks to business reporters

Paroma Soni of Columbia Journalism Review writes about how a leak by a former Facebook employee earlier this year to a Guardian business reporter did not receive as much attention as a recent leak to a Wall Street Journal reporter.

Soni writes, “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.

“Now, with press coverage swirling around Haugen, Zhang has been drafted as a secondary character in another’s story. What distinguishes the two whistleblowers reflects complicated truths about what catches the public’s attention, the effects of strategic PR, and the extent of journalism’s value in holding the powerful to account. ‘I don’t want to say that the rest of the press had a responsibility to pay more attention to Sophie Zhang,’ Wong told me, reflecting on the response to her reporting. ‘But it’s kind of obvious that the playing field was not level. I mean, hats off to Frances and her team—they are doing a great job of creating as much impact as possible. It’s certainly not a traditional journalistic route.’

“Haugen—who first leaked documents to Jeff Horwitz, a tech-industry reporter for the Wall Street Journal, and then revealed her identity on 60 Minutes—was supported by sophisticated PR, with Bill Burton, a former aide to Barack Obama, serving as her publicist, and Whistleblower Aid, a nonprofit, providing legal representation.”