In late 2021, Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen released a trove of documents that revealed disturbing aspects of the company’s internal practices, including that it knew it was harmful for young users but did little to address the problem. Now, she’s on the offensive against the social media giant once again, this time by asking investors to pressure the company into being more transparent.

Speaking to a national convention of investors, Haugen laid out the case for requiring Facebook to disclose risks and harms to its users as part of the information it has to share to trade on the stock market.

“If platforms don’t have to do reporting, they’ll never make progress,” Haugen said. “There’s a huge opportunity for the investment community to take a leadership role here and demand social platforms release a minimum level of information, to establish transparency,”

“Facebook’s version of transparency is that it only provides a list of the top 20 posts in the United States once a quarter — the cleanest version of Facebook in the world — and even in that list you see posts that get taken down,” she continued.

It’s hard to make Facebook reveal more about itself than it wants to, but pressuring the company’s pocketbooks could be the right way to force more transparency for users.

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