The Link Between Celiac Disease and Facebook Whistleblower Frances Haugen

Celiac.com 10/26/2021 - Frances Haugen has been in the news recently after speaking to Congress as the whistleblower behind a series of damaging revelations about Facebook putting its profits before the public good.

It turns out that the story of Haugen's Facebook journey starts with her recovery from celiac disease. Before the 37-year-old became famous for leaking tens of thousands of internal company documents to support her belief that Facebook was not publicly acknowledging the harm its caused by its platforms, she was a successful tech professional who had worked at Pinterest and Google.

Celiac.com Sponsor (A12):
About ten years ago, Haugen was diagnosed with celiac disease, an autoimmune condition, and in 2014 entered an intensive care unit with a blood clot in her thigh. To help manage her recovery, she hired an old friend to do light chores and errands like shopping.

But her friend quickly began to spiral into a dark world of online forums pushing conspiracy theories about sinister groups manipulating politics, and the friendship soon ended as a result. 

“It was a really important friendship, and then I lost him,” she told reporters. 

Eventually, her friend regained his footing in reality, but not before descending into a world dominated by a fixation on the occult and white nationalism. Those events had a profound effect on Haugen’s career path.

“It’s one thing to study misinformation, it’s another to lose someone to it,” she said. “A lot of people who work on these products only see the positive side of things.”

In 2018, a Facebook recruiter approached Haugen to work with the company, she asked for work related to democracy and countering the spread of false information. She was hired, and in 2019 became a product manager in Facebook’s civic integrity team, which looks at election interference around the world. Facebook disbanded their civic integrity team after the 2020 US presidential election. In the wake of that decision, and following the 6 January riot in Washington Haugen contacted the Wall Street Journal and took her story public.

The celiac disease connection may be incidental, but it reminds people that we're only a few degrees of separation away from celiac disease, and that people with celiac disease can do great things and make a difference in the world. It's a message that needs to be driven home time and time again.

Read more at the Guardian, and at the Wall Street Journal