In his personal post, Zuckerberg elaborates on Haugen’s claims, which he says “make no sense.” He points out that Facebook invests a lot of money in fighting harmful content: “If we didn’t care about that, why do we employ so many more people fighting this than any other company in our industry?”
Zuckerberg also says that, given Facebook’s revenue model, it doesn’t make sense at all to show polarizing content in users’ timelines: “We make money from ads and advertisers constantly tell us that they don’t want their ads next to harmful or angry content. “
Facebook and Instagram outage
In addition, social media such as Instagram also has beneficial effects on teenage girls, among others, Zuckerberg says: “In fact, our research showed that many teenagers are helped by using Instagram when they are struggling with the issues that always plague teenagers.”
The Facebook CEO also briefly recalled Monday’s outage of Facebook, Whatsapp and Instagram which he called “the worst outage in years”. “This also reminded us of how important our work is to people.”
Whistleblower Haugen, on the other hand, applauded the outage, she said at the hearing: “I don’t know why there was an outage, but I do know that Facebook was not used for more than five hours to deepen rifts in society, destabilize democracies. and making young girls and women feel bad about their bodies.”
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