Facebook’s embattled CEO Mark Zuckerberg tried Monday to discredit the deluge of bad press coming his way thanks to former employee-turned-whistleblower Frances Haugen and the consortium of news organizations rolling out reports based on the damning internal documents she supplied. “What we’re seeing is a coordinated effort to selectively use leaked documents to paint a false picture of our company,” Zuckerberg reportedly said on Facebook’s third-quarter earnings call, adding in the same breath in his belief that “large organizations should be scrutinized, and I’d much rather live in a society where they are than one where they can’t be.”
Zuckerberg told analysts on the Q3 call that he is “proud of our record navigating the complex tradeoffs involved in operating services at global scale” and “of the research and transparency we bring to our work”—accomplishments that, he reasoned, “any honest account of how we’ve handled these issues” should take into consideration. All of which sounded somewhat dissonant amid reports of the platform’s struggles, or in some cases negligence, when it comes to moderating inflammatory content—such as hate speech, posts inciting violence, and misinformation—in several developing countries, and on its home turf.
That the Facebook chief told a story about his company at odds with those strewn across home pages of several prominent outlets is par for the course; fittingly, some of those articles are about his very tendency to do so. Others, as laid out in a running list by Protocol—as well as by Katie Harbath, Facebook’s former director of public policy, in a Google Doc—detail internal fury over the site’s policies and unwillingness to take action on researchers’ findings. Several newsletters Tuesday emphasized the sheer breadth of the data dump—65 different stories on Monday—and how one might go about navigating it most effectively. Especially given that the coverage shows no signs of stopping, as Platformer’s Casey Newton pointed out: Haugen will “continue releasing documents for the next several weeks” and “a host of new publications joined the consortium” on Monday (The Guardian and CNBC are reportedly among them).
Newton also noted the ways in which the documents support existing criticisms of Facebook, such as “the significant variation in content moderation resources afforded to different countries”—inequality lawmakers and activists have been flagging for years. It is “hard not to marvel once again at Facebook’s sheer size; the staggering complexity of understanding how it works, even for the people charged with operating it,” Newton writes. “There is a pervasive sense that, on some fundamental level, no one is entirely sure what’s going on.”
After reviewing the documents and discussing them with current and former Facebook staffers, Newton concludes that “it’s clear that a large contingent of workers within the company are trying diligently to rein in the platform’s worst abuses” through “a variety of systems that are dizzying in their scope, scale, and sophistication. It’s also clear that they are facing external pressures over which they have no control,” Newton says—an argument Zuckerberg appeared to make during Monday’s Q3 call as he claimed social media platforms such as his own are not the main reason for problems such as misinformation and hate speech. Political “polarization started rising in the U.S. before I was born,” he reportedly said.
Meanwhile, other tech CEOs are keeping their distance from Zuckerberg and the chaos that has been building around him since the Wall Street Journal, Haugen’s outlet of choice, launched its “Facebook Files” series. Representatives from TikTok, YouTube, and Snapchat will appear before the Senate Commerce consumer protection subcommittee on Tuesday “with a key priority: distinguishing their practices from Facebook’s,” according to Axios. At the hearing, which comes amid discussion on government regulation of Big Tech, executives are reportedly expected to emphasize safety practices they’ve implemented, such as TikTok disabling direct messages for users under 16, and how their offerings and best practices differ from Facebook’s.
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