I’m not asking for a seat anymore; I'm flipping the table.
I am a tech industry veteran who is passionate about exposing the truth of Big Tech’s impact on young people. This journey started after I was a Director at Meta and witnessed first-hand the lengths leadership was willing to go to cover up their harms to children in order to maximize profits, and to silence those who stood against it.
I once loved Facebook and its promise to make the world more open and connected. I believed what we said publicly, that everything was being done to keep people safe.
That changed in 2022, when I joined the leadership team for Horizon Worlds. That role required deep visibility into internal product decisions, safety risks, and regulatory implications. What I discovered was horrifying: the collection of kids’ data and exposure to unknown adults without parental consent or controls in an environment rife with race- and gender- based harassment and virtual assaults. Worse, leadership working together to actively cover up our knowledge of these harms instead of fixing the problems.
There were organization-wide directives to avoid taking notes or keeping any record of our knowledge of children using the product. The company’s priority was not to keep kids safe, but to keep itself safe. During one executive playtest, we could not hear one another over the sounds of screaming children. Instead of addressing the problem, leadership moved the test to a private space. We had built a place for predators to thrive unchecked, yet it was my job to lead the expansion to teens and children, to new countries, and to mobile, so that more people — more kids — could access it anywhere. And the plan of record was to imply we had parental controls, even though they weren’t ready.
When I raised the problem, I became the problem. I was first instructed to silence another concerned woman. I refused, and as I continued raising the issue, was eventually removed from the meetings required to do my job—citing concerns about “confidentiality.” Leadership did not want me to fix the problem; they wanted me to make it go away. When I wouldn’t, they made me go away.
The cognitive dissonance — that the company I once believed in was putting profit before people — and Meta’s sophisticated system of harassment and retaliation toward those, especially women, who speak up about it culminated in a significant mental health and functional collapse from which I am still recovering. I declined Meta’s severance offer and have dedicated the capacity I do have to create a safer internet for kids, coming to terms with the fact that I spent 15 years building a company, an industry, that lack the capacity for self-regulation while inflicting real damage.
I’ve since provided sworn testimony to the FTC, testified before Washington State Senate committees, and filed a discrimination lawsuit against Meta that survived the company’s motion to dismiss and is now in federal court in discovery. Everything I testified to has since been corroborated: by Fairplay’s independent research and request for investigation to the FTC, Meta’s own scientists who testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee about systematic suppression of Horizon safety research, and again now by the unsealed evidence in the Los Angeles social media addiction trial.
I filed a lawsuit and have become a federal whistleblower and advocate for kids online safety legislation. My case has been covered in Fortune, Washington Post, TechCrunch, and Business Insider.
Abandoning myself to perform perfection in harmful systems nearly killed me – now I write to make meaning of my experiences and help others feel seen.
Systems of power that rely on the extraction and exploitation of those more vulnerable are not limited to tech, and I write about where these systems intersect, how they impact our lives, and what we can do to drive resistance and change.
Overturned is truth-telling to challenge broken systems of power and imagine new possibilities.
