The Signal Was There. Nobody Caught It
Eight years later, it became a $50B crisis.
Katie Harbath spent a decade running Facebook’s global elections team — she was in the room when the decisions were made. Now she advises AI companies on how to catch the next crisis a quarter earlier. This is the story she wants every AI builder to read.
At a Glance
In this piece, you will learn:
Why signals die — not because they’re wrong, but because there’s nowhere for them to live
The traffic-light framework that forces honest conversations before a decision becomes a crisis
What “knowing your red lines” actually means when your salary depends on looking the other way
This post is prepared with Guest Author — Katie Harbath, founder of Anchor Change, former head of global elections at Facebook, and author of the upcoming book Disrupting Politics (fall 2026). If you also want to write for Creators AI — send us email here
Hey, I’m Daniil and welcome to a special edition of Creators’ AI.
Most of us here aren’t building Facebook. We’re shipping AI agents, training models on scraped data, plugging Claude into client work. Small operations, moving fast.
Here’s the uncomfortable part. Every “reasonable” call you’re making right now has the same shape as Facebook’s 2010 decision to open user data to developers. Eight years later, that became Cambridge Analytica.
Katie Harbath was in the room for it. She ran Facebook’s global elections team for a decade. Foreign Policy calls her “the election whisperer to the tech industry.” Now she helps AI companies catch the next crisis a quarter earlier.
Over to Katie.
In December 2015, I saw the news story that would eventually become the Cambridge Analytica scandal. I escalated it. Then I let it go.
Eight years, one congressional hearing, and roughly $50 billion in Facebook market cap loss later, here’s what I wish I’d done differently — and why every AI team I advise today is one decision away from their own version of that story.
What happened
In 2010, Facebook launched a product that seemed like a complete no-brainer at the time.
The company was under pressure to share more data with developers and advertisers. So they built Open Graph, a product that let anyone create an app where users could log in with their Facebook credentials, giving developers access not just to that user’s data but also to their friends’ likes and interests.
Five years later, in 2015, Harry Davies of The Guardian published the first story about Cambridge Analytica. Cambridge University researcher Dr. Aleksandr Kogan used access to the Open Graph to pull data on Facebook users, then sold it to a political modeling firm. A few of us flagged it internally. The data had already left our servers. We had one person investigating violations. I didn’t want to overstep.
And then I let it go.
It went quiet for 27 months until 2018, when the New York Times and The Guardian were both working on it again with a whistleblower. Cambridge Analytica had paid $800,000 for Kogan to build the app. Eighty-seven million profiles affected. Those of us who knew pieces of what had happened were suddenly getting pinged by multiple VPs with no process for who was in charge, what the facts were, or what we were going to say we were doing about it.
That led to five days of silence from leadership and a huge hit to the stock price.
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What I learned, and what it means for you
I want to be careful here, because it’s very easy to look back at a decade-long chain of decisions and say what should have been obvious. Most of it was not obvious at the time. That’s the point.
Signal without a home dies.
In 2015, I had the signal. I escalated it. It landed in a queue with one overworked person and an organization that had no real process for “this might become a major problem in two years.” The signal died not because it was wrong but because there was nowhere for it to live.
The AI equivalent is happening right now at companies you’d recognize. Take Character.ai — they got an outside signal that their chatbot might be harmful to minors. The next thing you know, families of three teens sued them, alleging their children died by or attempted suicide after interacting with their chatbot. We don’t know the exact decision-making process, but it’s possible the outside signal had nowhere to go.
If you’re building AI products right now, ask yourself: who owns the early flag? Not the crisis — the thing that hasn’t become a crisis yet but has the shape of one. If that person doesn’t exist with dedicated time and actual authority, your signals are dying in someone’s inbox right now.
We’ve documented what happens when AI products skip this question: Biggest AI Failures of 2024
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