Facebook Decries Wall Street Journal Reporting on Internal Research
The company says recent Wall Street Journal reports 'have contained deliberate mischaracterizations' of its operations. But it's not the only publication publishing damning reports about the social network lately.
Facebook VP of Global Affairs Nick Clegg has officially responded to "The Facebook Files," a series from The Wall Street Journal based on internal Facebook documents, and saying he doesn't seem impressed would be an understatement.
So far, theJournal has reported on a program that held high-profile people to different standards than ordinary Facebook users; Signs that Facebook is aware of the risks Instagram posesto teenage users; a change to Facebook's algorithms that backfired; the company's struggle to handle dangerous content; and the ways anti-vaxxers have abused the platform.
"These are serious and complex issues," Clegg said in a statement released on Saturday, "and it is absolutely legitimate for us to be held to account for how we deal with them. But these stories have contained deliberate mischaracterizations of what we are trying to do, and give egregiously false motives to Facebook's leadership and employees."
This is the crux of Clegg's objection to the Journal's reporting:
"At the heart of this series is an allegation that is just plain false: that Facebook conducts research and then systematically and willfully ignores it if the findings are inconvenient for the company. This impugns the motives and hard work of thousands of researchers, policy experts and engineers at Facebook who strive to improve the quality of our products, and to understand their wider (positive and negative) impact. It's a claim which could only be made by cherry-picking selective quotes from individual pieces of leaked material in a way that presents complex and nuanced issues as if there is only ever one right answer."
The Journal, for its part, said in the first report for "The Facebook Files" that its investigation was based on "an extensive array of internal Facebook communications" as well as "interviews with dozens of current and former employees." It also said at least some of these documents have been submitted to Congress and the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Clegg's response wasn't limited to allegations of cherry-picking. "Facebook understands the significant responsibility that comes with operating a global platform," he said. "We take it seriously, and we don't shy away from scrutiny and criticism. But we fundamentally reject this mischaracterization of our work and impugning of the company's motives."
Yet The New York Times reported that Facebook executives wanted to "selectively disclose its own data in the form of carefully curated reports, rather than handing outsiders the tools to discover it themselves," just one month before the social network published its first "Widely Viewed Content Report," in a purported attempt to be more transparent about its platform.
That report did reveal that Facebook had mistakenly provided researchers just half of the data it had promised to give them regarding engagement with political content in the US. (Information gathered from other countries was reportedly unaffected.) The company acknowledged this error and said it would attempt to send the full data in the next few weeks.
Facebook has also been accused of being hostile to outside researchers in recent months, first with New York University's efforts to examine political advertisements on the social network, then with a nonprofit called AlgorithmWatch that said the company issued a "thinly veiled threat" related to its research into Instagram's recommendations algorithms.
The company originally claimed that its 2019 agreement with the Federal Trade Commission, which said in a recent amendment to its antitrust complaint against Facebook that it's "a monopolist that abused its excessive market power to eliminate threats to its dominance," required it to interfere with NYU's research. But the FTC said that claim was false.
"What would be really worrisome is if Facebook didn't do this sort of research in the first place," Clegg said today. "The reason we do it is to hold up a mirror to ourselves and ask the difficult questions about how people interact at scale with social media. These are often complex problems where there are no easy answers—notwithstanding the wish to reduce them to an attention -grabbing newspaper headline."
Not that many newspapers can publish attention-grabbing headlines anymore: Many smaller publications were shut down after they lost their advertising revenues to Google and Facebook, and larger publications laid off countless writers to focus on video content in a move that later backfired in no small part due to Facebook inflating ad metrics for its videos.