Facebook Calls Wall Street Journal Reports “Deliberate Misinterpretations” | Facebook

The newspaper’s work contained “deliberate misinterpretations of what we are trying to do and gave Facebook management and employees extremely false grounds,” said the former British Deputy Prime Minister.

The newspaper’s report on what Facebook knew about the impacts on teenage mental health of its Instagram photo-sharing platform sparked outrage and calls for more regulation.

The newspaper also reported that moderation of Facebook content is easy for politicians and celebrities even when they violate user guidelines, and said human traffickers and drug cartels benefit from the reach. and the growth of Facebook in developing countries.

In a statement posted to Facebook’s corporate website on Saturday under the headline “What The Wall Street Journal Went Wrong,” Clegg said the newspaper failed to present all of the “most difficult issues. that we face as a business – from content moderation and misinformation about vaccines, to algorithmic delivery and adolescent well-being ”.

He also said the reporting was based on selective quotes from internal reports designed to “stand in a mirror and ask the tough questions about how people engage with social media on a large scale.”

“These are serious and complex issues and it is absolutely legitimate that we are held accountable for how we deal with them,” Clegg wrote.

“[But] 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.

Clegg said that Facebook “understands the important responsibility that comes with operating a global platform. We take it seriously, and we don’t hesitate to review and criticize.

“I wish there were easy answers to these problems and that the choices we might make weren’t accompanied by difficult compromises… [but] this is not the world we live in.