Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday denied that the social media company promotes hatred and divisions in communities, harms children and needs control.
“At the heart of these allegations is the notion that we are making financial gains for security and convenience,” Zuckerberg said in a lengthy note to his staff on his Facebook page. Quite simply, this is not true and the argument that we deliberately promote content that angers people in order to make money is completely unreasonable. We make money from ads, and advertisers keep saying that they do not want their ads to be displayed with any malicious or provocative content.
“I don’t know of any technology company that makes products that make people angry or depressed,” he said. All ethical, business and product incentives point in the opposite direction.
Zuckerberg’s position came at the end of a U.S. Senate committee investigation into a former Facebook employee who leaked domestic company documents.
Francis Hogan testified on Capitol Hill after Facebook leaked several internal research to authorities and the Wall Street Journal warning that it could be detrimental to teens’ mental health.
Hogan spoke before senators, specializing in tracking digital service failures that Facebook and its apps, such as WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger, faced an unprecedented crash of nearly seven hours and affected billions of users.