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Facebook pushed back the Wall Street Journal’s explosive series on the social media giant on Saturday, telling the stories “Contained deliberately erroneous interpretations of what we are trying to do and conferred grossly false motives on Facebook executives and employees.”
The five-part series, which aired last week, examines how Facebook has handled a number of issues, including the rhetoric of the COVID-19 vaccine, the effects of the Instagram app on young users, and the response. from the company to employees who have raised concerns about human traffickers and drug cartels on the platform.
The Journal’s reports were based on internal documents such as online discussions with employees, research reports and presentation drafts.
The series alleged that Facebook downplayed Instagram’s negative effects; allowed vaccine opponents to spread COVID-19 misinformation or anti-vaccine rhetoric on its platform; and did not provide a firm response when concerns were raised about human traffickers using their platform.
In a blog post on Saturday, Nick Clegg, Facebook’s vice president of global affairs, argued that the articles took a “deliberately lopsided view of the facts at large.”
“At the heart of this series is a simply bogus claim: that Facebook conducts research and then systematically and intentionally ignores it if the results are inconvenient for the business,” writes Clegg.
“It challenges the motivations and hard work of thousands of researchers, policy experts and engineers at Facebook who strive to improve the quality of our products and understand their wider impact (positive and negative). “, he added.
Aiming at the story of COVID-19 disinformation on the platform, Clegg noted that since January vaccine reluctance has declined by around 50% among Facebook users in the United States.
Apparently in response to another story about the effects of Instagram among young users, Clegg said “that research into the impact of social media on people is still relatively nascent and evolving, and social media itself. evolve rapidly “.
Clegg acknowledged that “it is absolutely legitimate that we are held accountable for how we handle” issues such as misinformation and content moderation, but later added in his blog post that “we fundamentally reject this distortion of our work and contesting the company’s motives. “
Following his blog post, Clegg told Axios in an interview that the company is committed to providing outside researchers with more data to review.
“We’re not yet in the kind of sustainable and reasonable place when it comes to how we make Facebook data available to external researchers,” Clegg told Axios. “It’s a journey we’re on. We want Facebook to try to make meaningful data available.”
Dustin Volz, a journalist for the Journal covering cybersecurity and intelligence who did not work on the series, argued that Facebook’s response did not deny specific points raised in the Journal’s investigation.
“This Facebook statement pokes fun at ‘misrepresentation’ and ‘unbalanced views’, but what it lacks is a refutation of all the specific facts reported by the WSJ,” Volz tweeted on Saturday.
This Facebook statement pokes fun at “misrepresentations” and “lopsided views,” but what it lacks is a refutation of all the specific facts reported by the WSJ. https://t.co/1TTj4OiCrk
– Dustin Volz (@dnvolz) September 19, 2021
La Colline has contacted the Journal for comment.
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