Facebook disputes claims it failed to address known issues

Facebook pushed back on Saturday against recent reports from the Wall Street Journal which cited a mine of leaked corporate documents to describe how Facebook executives have been slow to respond to known issues on its platforms that harm users. In a corporate blog postFacebook vice president of global affairs Nick Clegg said the articles contained “deliberate misinterpretations” and “conferred patently false motives on Facebook executives and employees.”

The Journal, referring to internal documents that included research reports, online employee discussions and draft presentations to senior management, said Facebook researchers have repeatedly sounded the alarm bells. on the “ill effects of the platform”, but they were ignored by superiors. The documents revealed corporate research showing how damaging Instagram can be to the mental health of adolescents, as Facebook executives failed to address employee concerns over reports of the platform being co-opted. trained by human traffickers in developing countries, and that Facebook grants preferential treatment to certain profiling users who flout its rules.

Clegg said that while it was “absolutely legitimate” for Facebook to be held accountable for how it approaches harmful issues on its platforms, the Journal’s reports used handpicked quotes from leaked documents to create “a deliberately unbalanced view of the larger facts.”

“At the heart of this series is a simply bogus claim: that Facebook conducts research and then systematically and willfully ignores it if the results are inconvenient for the business,” said Clegg.

He went on to add, “With any research there will be ideas for improvement that are effective to pursue and ideas where the tradeoffs against other important considerations are worse than the proposed fix. Just because not all ideas a researcher brings up take action doesn’t mean that Facebook teams aren’t continually considering a range of different improvements.

Clegg has defended Facebook’s handling of posts about coronavirus vaccine news, another issue noted in Journal reports. He said that the “intersection between social media and wellness” is still an evolving issue within the research community, and that social media is evolving rapidly in response to an “ever-growing body of research. multi-method and expert contributions “.

According to a published article Friday, Facebook researchers warned the company that anti-vaccines are teaming up to flood the comments section of vaccine-related content with propaganda and other false claims. An internal report in early 2021 estimated that more than 40% of comments on vaccine-related content appeared to discourage people from getting vaccinated against the coronavirus. Global health experts like the World Health Organization and Unicef, whose posts were among those bombed, had also voiced concerns to Facebook about the issue.

These targeted anti-vax disinformation campaigns intensified in the months that followed. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg signaled that the platform will not take strong action against anti-vaccination misinformation in the same way it has done for the coronavirus pandemic.

“If someone reports a case where a vaccine has caused harm or is worried about it – you know that’s a hard thing to say from my point of view that you shouldn’t be allowed to speak out. at all, ”he said. Axes in September 2020.