The articles say that Facebook exempted high profile users from some or all of its rules
–
Facebook Inc. on Saturday criticized a series of Wall Street Journal articles on the social media company’s platform as “deliberate misrepresentation” and said the articles “gave the leadership and employees of Facebook tremendously false motives”.
The Wall Street Journal cited a review of internal company documents that included research reports, online staff interviews, and draft presentations for senior executives, saying that although Facebook researchers identified “the negative impact of the platform,” the company has failed to address them .
The Wall Street Journal articles state that Facebook exempted high profile users from some or all of its rules, downplayed the negative impact of its Instagram app on young users, changed its algorithm that made the platform “angrier”, and poor response to alerts from staff about how the platform is being used by traffickers in developing countries.
Nick Clegg, Facebook’s vice president of global affairs, wrote in a blog post that the Wall Street Journal stories “were deliberately misrepresenting what we were trying to do and attributing tremendously misguided motives to the leadership and staff of Facebook.”
Clegg called “simply wrong” a claim that “Facebook does research and then systematically and deliberately ignores it when the results are inconvenient to the company.”
Facebook, according to Clegg, understands the “considerable responsibility that goes hand in hand with operating a global platform” and takes it seriously, but “we fundamentally reject this misrepresentation of our work and contestation of corporate motives.”
Clegg defended Facebook’s handling of posts about the COVID-19 vaccine, saying the “interface between social media and wellbeing” was still an evolving topic in the research community.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and will be posted via a syndicated feed.)
–
.
