The company says recent Wall Street Journal reports ‘have contained deliberate mischaracterizations’ of its operations. But it’s not the only publication publishing damning reports about the social network lately.
Facebook VP of Global Affairs Nick Clegg has officially responded to ” The Facebook Files,” a series from The Wall Street Journal based on internal Facebook documents, and saying he doesn’t seem impressed would be an understatement. So far, the Journal has reported on a program that held high-profile people to different standards than ordinary Facebook users; indications that Facebook is aware of the risks Instagram poses to teenage users; a change to Facebook’s algorithms that backfired; the company’s struggle to handle dangerous content; and the ways anti-vaxxers have abused the platform. “These are serious and complex issues,” Clegg said in a statement released on Saturday, “and it is absolutely legitimate for us to be held to account for how we deal with them. But these stories have contained deliberate mischaracterizations of what we are trying to do, and conferred egregiously false motives to Facebook’s leadership and employees.” This is the crux of Clegg’s objection to the Journal’s reporting: “At the heart of this series is an allegation that is just plain false: that Facebook conducts research and then systematically and willfully ignores it if the findings are inconvenient for the company. This impugns the motives and hard work of thousands of researchers, policy experts and engineers at Facebook who strive to improve the quality of our products, and to understand their wider (positive and negative) impact.
