[ad_1]
- The Wall Street Journal ran a series of reports concluding that Facebook was “riddled with flaws.”
- The series revealed that the company is turning a blind eye to its impact on everything from young girls using Instagram to human trafficking.
- Facebook has just released a statement calling the series “deliberate misrepresentation.”
Facebook hit back at the Wall Street Journal following the newspaper’s multi-part series that described employee concerns about a litany of issues at the social media giant, from human trafficking through the site to shutdowns. eyes on adolescent mental health. .
“The Facebook Files,” released last week, revealed that Facebook employees know the social media giant is “riddled with flaws.”
Facebook responded on Saturday by calling the series “deliberate misrepresentation” in a statement written by Nick Clegg, the company’s vice president of global affairs.
“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 wrote.
The Journal examined internal company research reports, employee online discussions and draft presentations made to management to reveal that the platform ignored its impact on young women, maintained a system that protects women. elite users against reprimands for breaking content rules, and more. The investigation revealed a number of damning cases where researchers identified and passed on information about the negative effects of the platform where the company did not immediately respond.
The report also found that Facebook spent 2.8 million hours, or roughly 319 years, researching false or misleading information on its platforms in the United States in 2020. Some missed content was related to the promotion of violence. gangs, human trafficking and drug cartels. , the Journal said.
In one case, Apple threatened to launch Facebook from its App Store following an October 2019 BBC report that human traffickers were using the platform to sell victims. The Journal’s new investigation found that Facebook was aware of the traffic issues before it received pressure from Apple, with a researcher writing an internal memo that a team had examined “how domestic bondage manifests itself on our platform throughout. throughout its life cycle: recruitment, and operation “throughout 2018 and the first half of 2019.
“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,” Clegg wrote. “What would be really worrying is if Facebook didn’t do this kind of research in the first place.”
Clegg concluded that the company “understands the significant responsibility” that comes with operating a platform used by half of the world’s people.
He said Facebook takes this responsibility seriously, “but we fundamentally reject this mischaracterization of our work and challenging the motives of the company.”
[ad_2]
Source link