Amidst a rough couple of weeks for Facebook, there are now renewed calls to break up the social media giant, but Facebook Files whistleblower Frances Haugen thinks this will not solve issues with the platform. Facebook was thrown into the spotlight in early September when the Wall Street Journal began publishing a series of damning revelations about the platform based on internal documents shared by Haugen. This reporting led to a Senate hearing at the end of the month where the company's safety chief was questioned for a grueling two and half hours on the impact Facebook products have on the mental health of teens. A couple of days later, Haugen appeared before the Senate where she said that the company should declare "moral bankruptcy" and shared her opinion on how the platform should be regulated. But what really renewed the calls for a breakup of the platform was when Facebook’s family of products — including Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger – went down for nearly six hours between October 4 and 5 in an unprecedented outage affecting billions of users and millions of businesses. Facebook bought WhatsApp for $16 billion in 2014 and bought Instagram for $1 billion two years before that. The outage shed light on how the integration of Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram made these platforms vulnerable to single points of failure. Renewed calls for the breakup of Facebook US Senator Elizabeth Warren, who was vocal in her calls for breaking up of big tech during her campaign to win the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, responded…
