As Congress prepares to question a new set of whistleblowers at Meta (formerly Facebook), The Tech Oversight Project has provided a brief history of former employees who have come forward and exposed the Mark Zuckerberg-led company’s dishonesty, culture of lawbreaking, and reckless endangerment of children online.
Sophie Zhang, 2021
Findings showed:
- Facebook failed to stop widespread, state-linked manipulation campaigns in over 25 countries involving fake accounts and organizations, which were designed to mimic users, and in an extreme case led to genocide in Myanmar.
- Facebook had no policy to stop or combat widespread and coordinated inauthentic behavior.
- Facebook suppressed Zhang’s findings internally before she went public.
Frances Haugen, 2021
Findings showed:
- Facebook leaders studied and knew that product design on Instagram was culpable for the steep decline in teenage mental health.
- Facebook created the XCheck program to ensure that elite celebrities were exempt from policy enforcement.
- Facebook suppressed election integrity programs designed to prevent election interference from countries like China, Iran, and Russia.
- Facebook purposefully designed its newsfeed and algorithm to amplify hate speech and harmful content.
- Facebook failed to respond effectively to human trafficking, drug trafficking, and cartel content.
Arturo Béjar, 2023
Findings showed:
- Meta executives, including Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, and Adam Mosseri, were repeatedly warned about minors receiving widespread, unwanted sexual contact from adults and failed to act.
- Leaked internal surveys show that 26% of users under 16 reported negative experiences over a seven-day period, and 20% of 13-to-15-year-olds had experienced being bullied, 13% experienced unwanted sexual advances, and 7% had seen self-harm content over the same period.
- Meta then shifted resources away from monitoring and reviewing reports of unacceptable content like pornography, terrorism, bullying, and excessive gore – now mostly relying on machine-learning models.
Sarah Wynn-Williams, 2025
Findings showed:
- Facebook created a covert initiative called Project Aldrin to develop a Chinese Communist Party-compliant (CCP) version of Facebook to expand into the country.
- Facebook senior executives helped develop censorship tools, including a “Chief Editor” tool, which would allow CCP leaders to have a global kill switch on content critical of the CCP’s government.
- Facebook, which repeatedly said that it “does not operate in China,” lied to the public about operating an $18-billion-per-year ad business in China (10% of its global revenue.
- To curry favor with CCP authorities, Facebook executives helped Chinese companies develop cutting-edge AI products that power the Chinese military and outcompete U.S. innovators.
- Instagram identified emotionally vulnerable behaviors, like deleting selfies, which it then provided to advertisers to target teenage girls.
- Facebook lied to Congress about shutting down pro-democracy activists in China, like Guo Wengui, to ingratiate the company with CCP leaders.
Metaverse VR Whistleblowers, 2025
Findings showed:
- Meta doctored and suppressed child safety research showing large-scale risks to minors and that children as young as 10 were exposed to sexual abuse grooming, sexual harassment, and violence on Metaverse platforms like Horizon Worlds and Quest.
- After Frances Haugen brought the Facebook Papers to light, Meta began systematically concealing data by having lawyers instruct researchers to run “sensitive” studies under attorney–client privilege, avoiding words like “illegal” or “violates the law,” reframing surveys so kids wouldn’t disclose harms, and stopping data collection that shows children under 10 were in the Metaverse.
- Meta developed Project Salsa, code-named Project Horton, to study the company’s effectiveness at determining the true age of VR users. The project was approved with a $1 million budget before being abruptly shut down to conceal research that shows Meta is violating the law.
Attaullah Baig, 2025
Findings showed:
- Meta’s former head of security for WhatsApp, Attaullah Baig, filed a lawsuit accusing Meta of ignoring major security and privacy flaws in the company’s supposedly end-to-end encryption messaging service.
- Baig’s lawsuit shows that thousands of WhatsApp and Meta employees could gain access to sensitive user data, including profile pictures, location, group memberships, and contact lists.
- Meta senior leaders, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg, were warned about the more than 100,000 accounts per day that are hacked and have rejected proposed security fixes.