Facebook fired back at the Wall Street Journal following the newspaper’s multi-part series that outlined employee concerns a few litany of issues at the social media giant, from the trafficking of humans through the location to turning a blind-eye to the psychological state of teenagers.
“The Facebook Files,” published last week, found Facebook employees know the social media giant is “riddled with flaws.”
On Saturday, Facebook responded by slamming the series as filled with “deliberate mischaracterizations” during a statement penned by Nick Clegg, the company’s vice chairman of worldwide affairs.
At the guts of this series is an allegation that’s just plain false: that Facebook conducts research then systematically and willfully ignores it if the findings are inconvenient for the corporate ,” Clegg wrote.
The Journal reviewed internal company research reports, online employee discussions, and drafts of presentations made to management to reveal the platform ignored its impact on young women, maintained a system that protects elite users from being reprimanded for breaking content rules, and more. The investigation found variety of damning instances where researchers identified and escalated information about the negative effects of the platform where the corporate didn’t immediately react.
The report also revealed that Facebook spent 2.8 million hours, or approximately 319 years, trying to find false or misleading information on its platforms within the US in 2020. Some content that was missed associated with the promotion of gang violence, human trafficking, and drug cartels, the Journal said.
In one instance, Apple threatened to kick Facebook off its App Store following an October 2019 BBC report that detailed human traffickers were using the platform to sell victims. The new Journal investigation found that Facebook knew about the trafficking concerns before receiving pressure from Apple, with one researcher writing an indoor memo stating that a team looked into “how domestic servitude manifests on our platform across its entire life cycle: recruitment, facilitation, and exploitation” throughout 2018 and therefore the half of 2019.
“With any research, there’ll be ideas for improvement that are effective to pursue and concepts where the tradeoffs against other important considerations are worse than the proposed fix,” Clegg wrote. “What would be really worrisome is that if Facebook didn’t do that kind of research within the first place.”
Clegg concluded that the corporate “understands the many responsibility” that comes with operating a platform that half the people on the earth use.
He said Facebook takes that responsibility seriously, “but we fundamentally reject this mischaracterization of our work and impugning of the company’s motives.”
