“DELIBERATE MISCHARACTERIZATIONS”: FACEBOOK ON WSJ ALLEGATIONS

Sun 19 September 2021:

Facebook Inc. lambasted a series of Wall Street Journal articles on its platform on Saturday, calling them “deliberate mischaracterizations” that “conferred egregiously incorrect motives to Facebook’s leadership and staff.”

According to the Wall Street Journal, despite Facebook researchers discovered “the platform’s ill effects,” the firm neglected to solve them, citing a review of internal corporate papers that included research reports, online employee chats, and drafts of presentations to senior management.

Nick Clegg, Facebook’s vice president of global affairs, writing in a blog post, said the Wall Street Journal’s stories “contained deliberate mischaracterizations of what we are trying to do, and conferred egregiously false motives to Facebook’s leadership and employees.”

Clegg called “just plain false” an allegation that “Facebook conducts research and then systematically and willfully ignores it if the findings are inconvenient for the company.”

Facebook, Clegg said, understands the “significant responsibility that comes with operating a global platform” and takes it seriously, but “we fundamentally reject this mischaracterization of our work and impugning of the company’s motives.”

Clegg defended Facebook’s handling of posts on the COVID-19 vaccine and said that the “intersection between social media and well-being” remains an evolving issue in the research community.

According to the Wall Street Journal articles, Facebook exempted high-profile users from some or all of its rules, downplayed the negative effects of its Instagram app on young users, made algorithm changes that made the platform “angrier,” and responded poorly to employee concerns about how the platform is used by human traffickers in developing countries.

(Input with agency)

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