Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a “coordinated” attempt to discredit the world’s most popular social network after publishing a series of stories about the company’s problems.
“I believe that large organizations should be scrutinized and I would rather live in a society where they are than in a society where they cannot exist. Conscientious criticism helps us become better. But, in my opinion, what we are seeing now is a coordinated effort to selectively use leaked documents in order to present a false picture of our company, ”the billionaire wrote on his Facebook page.
According to the entrepreneur, companies do not have to make all decisions about their media policy on their own – in some cases, government regulation needs to be applied. He noted that companies have to find a compromise between conflicting concepts – for example, between freedom of speech and control over the distribution of malicious content, as well as user privacy and cooperation with law enforcement agencies.
Zuckerberg’s announcement came shortly after a series of domestic media reports on October 25, based on leaked internal company documents, was published by a number of global media outlets. The documents, archived under the name The Facebook Papers, were provided to reporters by a former Facebook employee, Frances Haugen. Hagen previously shared part of the archive with The Wall Street Journal and wrote about a dozen complaints to the US Securities and Exchange Commission. The whistleblower stated that Facebook negatively affects children and young people, damages democracy, contributes to the polarization of society and misleads investors, since the company’s public statements allegedly do not correspond to its real actions.
New data released on Monday showed that the company’s management was aware of the problem of radicalizing users and promoting fakes and conspiracy theories, and also relaxed content moderation rules for popular users and politicians to avoid negative reactions. In addition, internal documents show that the social network removes less than 5% of hate speech (Zuckerberg cited 94% in 2020), and a lack of moderators has contributed to the spread of hate speech and content with terrorist content in some countries with unstable political situations, including Afghanistan and Myanmar.
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