Facebook’s VP of worldwide issues condemned a progression of stories by the Wall Street Journal that detailed the informal community knows about various issues across its foundation that cause damage to clients, yet does little to fix them.
In a post on Facebook’s blog, Nick Clegg wrote that while it was “absolutely legitimate for us to be held to account for how we deal with” some of the issues outlined in the Journal reporting, the stories “contained deliberate mischaracterizations of what we are trying to do, and conferred egregiously false motives to Facebook’s leadership and employees.”
This week, the Journal published a sweeping series of deeply reported stories on Facebook, based on its review of internal documents, concluding that the company’s platforms “are riddled with flaws that cause harm, often in ways only the company fully understands.”
The tales included insights regarding the XCheck program that the Journal found absolves superstars from Facebook’s standard control governs; a gander at inside research that shows its photograph stage Instagram is tricky for more youthful clients’ emotional well-being; the means by which changes Facebook made to its calculation expanded commitment yet really made clients angrier; a glance at representatives’ interests concerning how its foundation might be utilized in illegal exploitation, and how CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s drive to advance COVID-19 antibodies attracted hostile to vax activists to flood Facebook with “hindrance to immunization” content. You can peruse the full Facebook Files series here.
Two Senators on the Commerce Committee board that supervises purchaser assurance said they were launching an investigation following the Journal’s report that Facebook knew that Instagram could be destructive to adolescent young ladies.
Clegg said in his blog post that the allegation that “Facebook conducts research and then systematically and willfully ignores it if the findings are inconvenient for the company” was incorrect. “[W]e fundamentally reject this mischaracterization of our work and impugning of the company’s motives.”
