Facebook whistleblower to push for regulation

Washington: A Facebook whistleblower goes before US lawmakers Tuesday to urge regulation of the social media giant, after an outage impacted potentially billions of users and highlighted global dependence on its services.

Ex-employee Frances Haugen is set to testify on Capitol Hill after she leaked reams of internal research to authorities and the Wall Street Journal, which detailed how Facebook knew its sites were potentially harmful to young people’s mental health.

She will speak before senators less than a day after Facebook, its photo-sharing app Instagram and messaging service WhatsApp went offline for roughly seven hours, with “billions of users” impacted, according to tracker Downdetector.