Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg says the accusation that his company prioritizes profit over user safety makes no sense. “It’s hard to see messages that misrepresent our work and motives. Unfortunately, I think most of us don’t recognize the false image being put up of us,” he writes.
Facebook has been in the eye of the storm for several days now that a whistleblower has come out with secret investigations and documents.
In recent weeks, the American newspaper The Wall Street Journal has published some sensational articles about practices at Facebook. “The Facebook Files” should show that the social networking site mainly looks at what is good for its own interest and not the interest of the public. The common thread: Facebook consciously chooses things that generate the most profit, even though the company knows that they can be harmful to its users.
The Wall Street Journal had obtained documents from a whistleblower at Facebook. A few days ago, he came out of anonymity in an interview with “60 Minutes” on the American channel CBS. Frances Haugen (37) is a former product manager in the disinformation department at Facebook. In May of this year, she left the company but secretly copied tens of thousands of pages of internal studies and documents at first.
Haugen spoke in the US Senate yesterday. Hearings are currently underway there on the influence and role of social media companies. Haugen repeated what she had said before. Her accusations are damning. “The leadership knows how to make Facebook and Instagram more secure, but they don’t change the necessary because they prefer astronomical gains over people,” Haugen said.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is now responding to the allegations for the first time. “Now that the hearing is over, I want to look back at the public debate we’re in. (…) It’s hard to see messages that misrepresent our work and our motives. Unfortunately, I think most of us don’t get the false picture recognize that ours is being hung,” he says in a post on his personal Facebook page.
