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How whistleblowing will change big tech

The latest whistleblower to sound the alarm against big tech testified before Congress earlier this month. In an exclusive interview with the Wall Street Journal, and then again before Congress, Arturo Bejar, a former Meta employee and consultant, revealed that Meta’s leadership failed to protect the youngest users on its platform from harm.

When Bejar, whose teen daughter was sexually harassed online, discovered that Mark Zuckerberg and Meta’s leadership had been aware of the issue, he said, “I found it heartbreaking because it meant that they knew and they were not acting on it.”

This week, we’re exploring whistleblowing: what it is, how it works, its history, and how it’s become a powerful tool to hold tech companies accountable.

// What is a whistleblower?

According to the National Whistleblower Center, a whistleblower reports waste, fraud, abuse, corruption, or dangers to public health and safety to someone in a position to rectify the wrongdoing. In exchange for unveiling this information, the whistleblower receives both protection and, in some cases, compensation.

// How it works

When someone seeks to initiate a whistleblowing report, they file a complaint with the specific government body responsible for the wrongdoing they’re disclosing.

• Laws: In the US, there are dozens of whistleblower laws at the local, state, and federal levels. Such laws keep the identities of whistleblowers confidential and protect them in case of retaliation. 
• Compensation: Whistleblowers are sometimes entitled to compensation. The 2010 Dodd-Frank Act requires whistleblowers who assist with prosecuting securities and commodities fraud to receive between 10-30% of monetary sanctions collected. The Securities and Exchange Commission has awarded approximately $1 billion to 207 individuals since issuing its first award in 2012.
• The global landscape: 59 countries have adopted whistleblower laws, and the United Nations has recognized whistleblowing as a crucial part of international law.

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The first whistleblowing law in the US was passed in 1778.

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// The history of whistleblowing

The first whistleblowing law in the US was passed in 1778. Since then, whistleblowing has played a crucial role in exposing government wrongdoing.

• Pentagon Papers: Daniel Ellsberg, an employee of the RAND Corporation, released what became known as the Pentagon Papers in 1971, revealing that Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration had lied to the public and Congress about the scope of its military operation in Vietnam.
• Tuskegee Syphilis Study: In 1972, Peter Buxtun, a US Public Health Service employee, exposed how the federal government had allowed hundreds of Black men in Alabama to go untreated for syphilis for 40 years, purely for research purposes.
• NSA Surveillance: Edward Snowden considered himself a whistleblower when he shared thousands of classified documents in 2013 chronicling the National Security Agency’s surveillance of American citizens. But the US government disagreed, charging him as a traitor in violation of the Espionage Act.

Wikipedia has a comprehensive list of whistleblowers from the first whistleblower in 1777 to the present day.

// Whistleblowing as a tool of accountability

The combination of three factors—1) the immense power of big tech, 2) growing concerns and evidence against their misconduct, and 3) the lack of effective regulation against them—have led to whistleblowing becoming an increasingly powerful tool to reveal private information, expose big tech firms in the press, and draw the attention of lawmakers.

Whistleblowers like Bejar are trying to do in big tech what whistleblowers did to the tobacco industry. 

• Jeffrey Wigand became a whistleblower against big tobacco, arguing that tobacco companies knew about the addictive properties of their cigarettes.
• Even still, it took more than a decade for meaningful regulation to take effect against tobacco companies.

// Whistleblowers in tech

Today’s tech whistleblowers are hoping their acts will lead to faster government regulation than what happened with big tobacco.

• Facebook & Frances Haugen: In 2021, Frances Haugen, leaked alarming evidence of how Facebook knew that its Instagram platform had negative impacts on teen users. Since then, Haugen has launched a nonprofit organization, Beyond the Screen, has partnered with Project Liberty on her Standard of Care initiative, and has propelled the movement of responsible tech by raising alarms about big tech’s impact on kids.
• Twitter & Anika Collier Navaroli: In 2022, Anika Collier Navaroli testified to the House Jan. 6 Committee that Twitter had allowed President Donald Trump’s rule-breaking tweets to remain on the platform because Twitter executives knew that their platform was the President’s “favorite and most-used…and enjoyed having that sort of power.” She told the Washington Post, “There’s got to be a balance of free expression and safety. But we also have to ask: Whose speech are we protecting at the expense of whose safety? And whose safety are we protecting at the expense of whose speech?”
• Instagram & Arturo Bejar: Bejar found that Instagram users were 100x more likely to witness bullying in the last week than Meta’s own bullying-prevalence data estimated. Among Instagram users under the age of 16, one in four had a bad experience in the last week due to witnessing hostility against someone based on their race, religion, or identity. One in five felt worse about themselves after viewing others’ posts, and one in eight had experienced unwanted sexual advances in the past week. Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, acknowledged the problem to Bejar, but ultimately Meta didn’t make any changes.

// The future of whistleblowing

Haugen, the 2021 Facebook whistleblower, believes that whistleblowing will only become a more important tool to hold tech firms accountable:

"It may be easy to think all big corporations are the same," she said. "But software/AI businesses face larger accountability hurdles because by default they operate in the dark on remote datacenters. Whistleblowers will only become more critical for democratic oversight of an ever-expanding slice of the economy, because the only people who know the truth about how AI companies operate are the company’s employees."

The recent whistleblowers are part of a growing chorus of tech workers, researchers, and activists blowing the whistle against big tech. And yet, a whistleblower can’t directly hold tech platforms accountable and force reforms. That’s the role of policymakers.

The problems in today’s online spaces are not easily solved with one solution. Instead, it will take a comprehensive suite of solutions to usher in the era of responsible tech: from researchers releasing new studies like the American Federation of Teachers Likes vs. Learning report, organizations activating campaigns like Safe Tech, Safe Kids, technologists who are building new protocols like DSNP and platforms like Mastodon, BlueSky, MeWe, and whistleblowers who are courageously holding big tech firms accountable. 

Other notable headlines

// 🚨 Leading the news this week has been the decision last Friday by OpenAI's board to fire Sam Altman as CEO. An article in The Verge breaks down the latest, as Altman tries to return.

// 🗣 An article in The New York Times cited research that found that antisemitic and anti-Muslim hate speech has spiked on social media platforms such as X, Facebook and Instagram.

// 🤔 Meta is calling for legislation requiring that parents approve teens’ downloads on app stores like Google and Apple, according to an article in The Washington Post. Such legislation would shift the onus of verifying children’s ages away from tech platforms and to parents and app stores.

// 🚫 An article in WIRED revealed that foreign companies that provide Big Tech with AI data-labeling services are inadvertently hiring young teens to work on their platforms, often exposing them to traumatic content.

// 🐦 The social media app Bluesky, which is building a decentralized alternative to Twitter, has just hit 2 million users, according to an article in TechCrunch.

// 🏛 An article in the Wall Street Journal raised the concern that authoritarianism rises when no one knows what’s true anymore. As generative AI enables disinformation at a mass scale, everyone must now question whether what they see and hear is true.

// 📺 The Markup provided a first-hand account of a Vietnamese grandmother who is fighting misinformation by creating her own YouTube channel.

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