Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday denied accusations that his company put profit over users’ safety and well-being.
Emphasizing that it has created several platforms for safety, entertainment, and the fight against harmful content.
-Advertisement-
Zuckerberg published a memo on his Facebook page today, in which he said, “The recent accusations about putting profits at the expense of health, safety, and entertainment are incorrect… and do not reflect the company we know.”
The release of the memo follows a hearing by a US Senate committee on Tuesday in which it questioned a former Facebook employee.
It had leaked documents accusing the company of fueling divisions and negatively affecting mental health in favor of profitability.
The founder of the social media giant said: “Many of the allegations are meaningless … if we are to ignore any harm to our platforms.
So why do we care about fighting harmful content, and why do we hire so many more people dedicated to it.”
-Advertisement-
“If we want to hide our results and research, why have we set an industry-leading standard for transparency and reporting on what we do?” he added.
The former employee, Frances Hogan, had leaked internal documents dating back to 2019 and indicated that Facebook and Instagram were fueling division and affecting mental health.
“The argument that we are deliberately promoting content that makes people angry for the sake of profit makes absolutely no sense,” Zuckerberg said.
We make money from ads, and advertisers tell us they don’t want their ads to show next to malicious or angry content.”
Regarding the downtime of Facebook and its affiliate platforms, he said, “We have spent the past 24 hours debriefing how we can strengthen our systems against this kind of failure… This was also a reminder of how important our work is to people.”
-Advertisement-
On Monday, the “WhatsApp”, “Facebook” and “Instagram” applications witnessed a malfunction in some regions of the world, and it lasted for several hours before gradually returning to work.
