Francis Haugen first met Jeff Horwitz, a tech-industry reporter for The Wall Street Journal, in early December on a hiking trail near the Chabot Space and Science Center in Oakland, California.
he liked that he seemed thoughtful, and he liked that he wrote about her of facebook His role in spreading violent Hindu nationalism in India, a particular interest of his. He also felt that he would support her as a person, and not just as a source who could provide the inside information he had gained during his nearly two years as a product manager at Facebook.
“I auditioned Jeff for a while,” Haugen told me in a phone interview from his home in Puerto Rico, “and one of the reasons I went with him was that he compared other choices I could make. I was less sensational.”
She became one of the greatest sources of the century, turning over thousands of pages of internal documents she had collected. Starting September 13, the Journal justified its confidence with a careful rollout that featured 11 major articles from Horwitz and other journalists deftly packaged under a catchy rubric, The Facebook Files.
Key revelations include how Facebook executives handled political lies, including Donald TrumpClaims of election rigging Often in order to keep as many people logged on as possible, the company chose to allow misinformation to spread widely. The series also noted that Facebook went into its desperation to hang on to its audience as young people moved away from their platforms.
The Journal also produced a podcast episode in which Haugen was presented as chivalrous, sharp, and deeply moral, a depiction which Horwitz told me he agreed with after much reporting, but which appeared in the white of a treasured source. -The amount of glove treatment is also there.
So there was an uncomfortable moment on October 7, when a communications firm working with Hogen invited Horwitz and two of his editors for a Zoom call with a group that was supposed to include journalists from 17 other US media outlets. will develop for
On the call, Haugen offered to share modified versions of the trove of Facebook documents under a restriction to be determined by the group. The firm, founded by Bill Burton, a former aide to Barack Obama, will help manage the process. After making their pitch, Horwitz and his colleagues found themselves in an awkward position: The source who had provided them with the stuff of so many specific scoops now sounded wicked.
“It’s a little weird,” Jason Dean, an editor for the journal, said on the call, according to three participants.
The Journal team left before the call was over. Since then, journalists from other outlets including The Atlantic, The Associated Press, CNN, NBC News, Fox Business and The New York Times, along with a parallel group in Europe, have been considering the first installment of Haugen’s documents. The plan is to publish its findings on Monday (though stories started trickling in from Friday night).
We live in a time of megaleaks enabled by the same digital technology that allows us to survey each other and document our lives like never before. These leaks have given leakers and their touts a new kind of power over the news media, raising intriguing questions about how their disclosures should enter the public domain. In particular, there are questions about the balance of power between the sources of important information and the journalists who benefit from them.
Some leaks, including files from the US military and State Department, emerged as massive data dumps on WikiLeaks or nameless servers; Files from the National Security Agency of Edward Snowden and others, including intercepts disclosures of America’s drone wars, emerged after journalists gained the confidence of sources.
The report on the Panama Papers, based on the leak of more than 11 million documents and other examinations of global tax evasion that followed, was brokered through the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, which managed a collaboration among hundreds of journalists around the world. . They read each other’s stories along with documents on a secure server before coordinating the rollout of their articles on social media.
In some cases, the leaker or hacker is the one who controls how and when the information is released. How this went for the 2016 presidential election, when a Kremlin-directed cyberattack on the Democratic National Committee led to the disastrous timely publication of the committee’s private documents on WikiLeaks.
In other instances, a major source may be found in a unified group of journalists – at the International Association of Investigative Journalists or elsewhere – who add layers of reporting and analysis to the raw material.
“You can’t afford to let the source dictate the story,” Gerard Ryle, director of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, said in an interview.
Haugen chose a middle route, one that from his point of view captured the best of both arrangements, while also thwarting Facebook’s attempts to include the story.
First, she submitted her documents to the Journal for the boutique rollout. Then it opened the journalism equivalent of an outlet store, allowing journalists from two continents to root out what the Journal had left behind in search of unseen informative gems. She said that her intention was to expand the circle. She said she plans to share the documents with academic writers and publications from parts of the world where they see the greatest threat, including India and parts of the Middle East.
“The reason I do this project is because I think the global South is in danger,” she said.
With this model, Haugen and his advisors have created a new type of journalism network that has stirred mixed feelings among the journalists involved. Over the past two weeks, they’ve gathered on the messaging app Slack to coordinate their plans — and the name of their Slack group, chosen by The Atlantic’s executive editor Adrienne LaFrance, suggests their ambition: “Obviously we are now a Consortium.”
Inside the Slack group, whose messages were shared with me by a participant, members have reflected on the strangeness of working with contestants, albeit tangibly. (I didn’t talk to any of the Times participants about Slack messages.)
“This is the weirdest thing I’ve ever been a part of in terms of reporting,” wrote Alex Heath, tech reporter for The Verge.
In an interview, The Associated Press’s head of investigation, Brian Carovillano, said, “It is remarkable to see that these news organizations, large and small, put aside some of their competing impulses and worked together to report a story that Which is unquestionably. Public interest.”
Slack Group has also discussed news outlets that are not part of the consortium, including The Information. (In an article published Friday about Haugen’s media strategy, The Information reported that he had asked to join the group, “but one participant said he was not accepting new members.”) The The Guardian, which publicly won the Pulitzer Prize. The service in 2014 for its report on covert surveillance by the National Security Agency – a series made possible by Snowden’s leaks – was another publication that was abandoned.
Haugen told participants that he thought the journal could publish more articles on the documents they provided, particularly on Facebook’s impact on countries where English is not the main language.
3 appearance on “60 Minutes” and Congressional testimony a few days later, have sent dark signals from Facebook and its allies that something is too good to be true about him. The Journal’s right-wing editorial page accused him of trying to censor political speech, writing that it was “notable that his presence was midwives by Bill Burton, a prominent Democratic communications executive.” A Facebook executive tweeted earlier to suggest that the ban could be an “orchestrated ‘gotcha’ campaign.”
I can’t find anything to suggest that more, or less, than getting an eye on Haugen, a high school debater who worked at Google and Pinterest before joining Facebook in 2019.
“There is no evidence in my mind of any other entities being involved,” Horwitz told me.
Lawrence Lessig, Roy L. of Law at Harvard Law School. The Furman professor, who volunteered as his attorney, said he had brought in Burton, a former Obama aide, in September while the Journal’s reporting was underway.
Haugen also solved a little mystery in our phone interview: whether he is quietly relying on the financial backing of eBay co-founder Pierre Omidyar, whose groups he began working with in October, as Politico first reported. had reported.
The reality, she said, is that she has her own financial resources, and has only accepted help from non-profit groups supported by Omidyar for travel and similar expenses.
“For the foreseeable future, I am fine, because I bought crypto at the right time,” he told me.
She noted that she had moved to Puerto Rico to deal with a health condition — but to join her “crypto friends” on the island, whose capital gains tax exemption has made it the focus of that novel financial system.
(Burton said he was initially working without pay, but is now being paid by donors, including a non-profit group backed by Omidyar.)
When I began reporting this column, I thought the central question would be whether Haugen’s strategy allowed him to control the story, and whether journalism had drifted into the idea of the collaboration group. But although a look at Twitter shows that journalists on any beat can slip into a herd mentality, there is little evidence that this leak, with its documentary detail, deepened that trend.
Competitive pressures remain close to the surface. The Journal may have preferred other outlets with its “Facebook Files” branding, but The Times’ Mike Isaacs wrote in the Slack Group that using that phrase would be “free advertising for the Journal series”, leading to newsletter platformer Casey Newton. will be inspired. Suggest going with “leftovers”. Most of the outlets settled on “The Facebook Papers”.
By Friday night — at the Black Friday information mall, so to speak — the Slack group was falling apart. Another Times reporter, Ryan Mack, dropped in late that afternoon with a “heads-up”: The Times would publish an article on Facebook’s conduct prior to the January 6 riots based in the US Capitol – he assured his rivals – “On the documents we got before the formation of the union.”
This seemed to many others within their letter of agreement, but also an attempt by the Times to get ahead of competitors who had not obtained separate documents.
“My view is, if you’re a reporter who has these documents, it would probably have been better if you weren’t part of the consortium, but instead running the clock,” NBC News’ Brandi Zadrozny raged at Slack Group.
After NBC News responded to the Times’ move by breaking the ban with its own Facebook article, Zadrozny apologized to his rival journalists in a Slack message: “My editor says if nytimes don’t follow the rules If it happens, we’re out. I’m really sorry. It sucks. And now it’s a media story.”
The Times’ spokeswoman, Danielle Rhodes Ha, said the publication operates by “the union’s ground rules” under which “documents received by the outlet prior to the formation of the union are not subject to restriction time.”
For his part, Haugen has viewed the rollout of the Journal and its rivals’ subsequent scramble to hold on with equanimity. “Now that I’ve met so many journalists, and I’ve seen how hard Jeff works, I feel more grateful to the media than when I started out,” she said.
This article was originally Appeared in the New York Times.
Ben Smith x c.2021 The New York Times Company
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