Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has denied that the social media giant promotes hatred and divisions in societies, harms children and needs regulation, stressing that accusations of his company putting financial profit above safety are “simply untrue”.
“At the heart of these accusations is the idea that we put financial profit over safety and comfort. Quite simply, it’s not true,” Zuckerberg said in a lengthy memo to his employees posted on his Facebook page.
“The argument that we are deliberately promoting content that makes people rapist in order to make money is completely unreasonable. We make money from ads and advertisers are constantly telling us that they don’t want their ads to be shown alongside any harmful or infuriating content,” he added.
“I don’t know of any tech company that builds products that make people angry or depressed. All the ethical and commercial incentives and products point in the opposite direction.”
Zuckerberg’s position came at the conclusion of a hearing by a US Senate committee in which it questioned a former Facebook employee who leaked internal company documents and accused the social media giant of fueling divisions, harming children and urgently needing regulation.
Frances Hogan testified on Capitol Hill after leaking a trove of internal research to authorities and the Wall Street Journal warning that Facebook could be harmful to teens’ mental health.
Hogan spoke before senators, a day after Facebook and its applications, WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger, faced an unprecedented outage that lasted nearly seven hours and affected “billions of users,” according to the Down Detector website, which specializes in monitoring digital service failures.
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