October 8, 2021
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has rejected claims by whistleblower Frances Haugen that the company puts profit before user safety.
According to Zuckerberg, “The argument that we deliberately push content that makes people angry for profit is deeply illogical. We make money from ads, and advertisers consistently tell us they don’t want their ads next to harmful or angry content. And I don’t know any tech company that sets out to build products that make people angry or depressed. The moral, business, and product incentives all point in the opposite direction.”
Haugen recently leaked some of Facebook’s internal research published online by the Wall Street Journal, particularly those that talked about the fact that Instagram knew the app was causing anxiety about body image among teenage girls.
In response to the leaked documents, Zuckerberg explained that many of the claims “don’t make sense” because for him, “If we wanted to ignore research, why would we create an industry-leading research program to understand these important issues in the first place? If we didn’t care about fighting harmful content, then why would we employ so many more people dedicated to this than any other company in our space — even ones larger than us? If we wanted to hide our results, why would we have established an industry-leading standard for transparency and reporting on what we’re doing?”
For more information, read the original story in ZDNet.
