Former Meta engineer and data scientist, Frances Haugen, will speak on social media harms on young users at SLCC South City Campus on November 7, 2024
Salt Lake City, November 1, 2024
In 2021, Frances Haugen hit a breaking point in her job as a lead product manager on Facebook’s Civic Misinformation team. An engineer and a data scientist, Haugen went public with what she had learned while working at Facebook (now known as Meta, Inc.
She blew the whistle loud, telling her story in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times Daily Podcast, on 60 minutes, and before Congress. She provided testimony and proof—with tens of thousands of internal documents—that showed Facebook knew its algorithms were contributing to the spread of ethnic violence and hatred as well as deepening harm to the self-esteem of its youngest users, especially girls.
On Thursday, November 7, Haugen will be in Salt Lake City to speak about what she knew then and what parents and users of social media should know now.
She is the keynote speaker at Salt Lake Community College’s Community Conversation event, which is part of the College’s Speaker Series. This event is free and open to the public with reservations,
She, along with a panel of local experts, will discuss social media’s impact on teen mental health. A relevant topic in Utah, which is one of the first states to pass legislation limiting social media access for children and where the Jordan School District is involved in a lawsuit against social media companies to recoup costs for mental health intervention. Increasingly, cell phones are being banned in Utah schools.
Panel of local experts:
The event will take place on November 7, 2024 at 7:00pm at The Grand Theatre, Salt Lake Community College’s South City Campus (1575 South State Street).
Tickets are free, but SLCC is asking those interested in attending to reserve seats at the Grand Theatre’s website.