Pinterest ($PINS) podcast mentions
Per Ticker.id: 4 Pinterest ($PINS) mentions across 1 podcast (30 days) — timestamped, verifiable quotes, updated 2026-10-09.
And by the time I got to Facebook, because I had gone on this kind of odd path through Silicon Valley, working on things that I really liked, even if, you know, maybe they're not the sexiest, like a lot of people don't care about Pinterest, let me really get down in the weeds around algorithmic bias. A lot of the problems we had, Facebook had too, we just had them in, maybe more innocent flavors, right? Like, you know, we were biased towards extravagant dinners and not dinners you would actually wanna cook, right? Like that was an algorithmic bias of ours. So we dealt with these problems, just no one was dying. But it meant that by the time I got to Facebook, I could look around and, and view it organizationally and say, wow, you're being held together by like a very small number of people who have worked here for like 10 years. Overwhelmingly, your staff is turned over every 2 to 3 years. It's like largely straight from college. And those, that small handful of people who've been here for 10 or 15 years, a lot of them are retiring.
Frances Haugen · The 404 Media Podcast · The Social Reckoning’s Real-Life Whistleblower · 2026-10-09When I joined Facebook, which is 2019, I feel like Facebook had been fairly earnestly trying to not repeat the mistakes of 2016. And after the 2016 election, a friend of mine who was very, very senior within the Facebook home feed team posted on Facebook, like a public post, uh, or I guess to friends, So not really public public, but like he posted basically like, we could have never seen this coming. And I wrote a very spicy comment back to him cuz I had been working basically as his peer, but at Pinterest. And I was like, hey, like for example, every— you have this feature where like when someone puts a like on a news story, you pop up this little carousel under that news story of like other news stories they might like to read. And very clearly, like the way you've been picking in these news stories is based on like the likelihood that someone clicks on the links. Because like these— this is where, um, Pope endorses Donald Trump like took off, right? Like all this, it would be, it would be like you'd have a very reasonable AP story and then underneath it, it would be like 3 crazy headlines.
Frances Haugen · The 404 Media Podcast · The Social Reckoning’s Real-Life Whistleblower · 2026-10-09So I totally agree with this assessment, and I want to take some personal responsibility. So when I worked at Pinterest— so Pinterest originally was you only got content from people you explicitly chose. So you heard from humans because you chose those humans. I think it was largely chronological. People didn't wanna do the labor of finding 50 accounts to follow, 'cause you needed about 50 in order to have a good feed. So they introduced topics, which kind of aggregated people together being like, oh, you said you like food, we think these accounts have a lot of food in them, we'll basically ghost follow you onto their account, um, 'cause you follow food. And then they, about maybe 6 months or a year before I joined Pinterest, they moved to pure recommendations. And, uh, I, I joined during a time period where they were dealing with the fallout of moving away from being anchored on people you chose.
Frances Haugen · The 404 Media Podcast · The Social Reckoning’s Real-Life Whistleblower · 2026-10-09So the challenge is that when you go from being in an environment where humans are mediating how you interact with the world to one where a computer is choosing how you interact with the world, in our case, our problem was it fostered a lot of monotony. Right? So the thing you are most likely to reshare is a thing identical to the last thing you reshared. So think of it this way, like you're shopping for daisy pillows. You want a nice daisy on this throw pillow in your, your thing. You add one to a board. Statistically speaking, the next thing you will add to the board is a photo that looks as similar to this one as possible. And people were coming up to me in networking events and saying, when did Pinterest get so boring? Right? Because like it went from being eclectic and like exposed to all these things to being boring. And the challenge was that, you know, the world of content that comes from people you opt into is small. The world of content that you have not opted into is infinite.
Frances Haugen · The 404 Media Podcast · The Social Reckoning’s Real-Life Whistleblower · 2026-10-09Frances, you were at Facebook for a little less than 2 years, I think. I think you had stints at Google, Yelp, and Pinterest before that. What do you think about technology, having gone through all of those places? Is technology a source for good and improvement for humankind or not?
Becky Quick · Squawk Pod · AI Safety with a Facebook Whistleblower & A $110B Media Merger 10/2/26 · 2026-10-02I would say we are facing a moment of inflection. So, uh, I got to be at Google kind of during the golden age of Google, and I got to watch the very beginning of us having major algorithmic systems. So when I was at Pinterest, like, we were dealing with the first issues around biases in our own algorithms and how that impacted the success or lack of success of the business. For example, they did consider adding men as different than women in the algorithm at the beginning, and as a result, men were getting recommended women's shoes, right? That's part of why not as many men use Pinterest in the United States, but they do internationally. Um, and these are systems that are incredibly complicated. Like, like, think of something as simple as that. You say, well, duh, of course men and women wear different shoes. If you don't incorporate Yeah, we've come to the point where everyone wears sneakers all the time.
Frances Haugen · Squawk Pod · AI Safety with a Facebook Whistleblower & A $110B Media Merger 10/2/26 · 2026-10-02