Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook
The appeal was made a few days after the company’s intention to change its name to respond to the recent scandals that have affected it and which are related, among other aspects, to the spread of hate speech, became known.
The past few weeks have been particularly hard on the empire of Mark Zuckerberg, who has struggled to minimize the damage caused by the revelations made by Frances Haugen, former employee of the company. Before the US Senate, Haugen has repeatedly asserted that Facebook and Instagram workers (social networks belonging to the same group) are aware of the dangers inherent in hate speech that is practiced there, choosing to prioritize profits at the expense of strategies that limit it.
As the hearing progresses and the senators insist on seeking and obtaining more evidence — which allows them to more strictly regulate the platform — the bells have already started to ring in the company’s own offices. Second advances the The Guardian, Facebook asked employees that preserve internal documents and the communications among employees, evoking legal motivations.
To Reuters, a company representative confirmed the internal communication. “Requesting the preservation of documents is something common when you are in the middle of legal inquiries”, he claimed. In question, advances the The New York Times, all communications must be in place since 2016, the year in which, for example, the Brexit referendum and the US elections took place, from which Donald Trump was victorious.
In addition to testifying before the US Congress about her own experience, Frances Haugen was also accompanied by internal documents, which in recent weeks have been extensively disseminated and published in the media.
Speaking to The Guardian, Frances Haugen said she decided to press ahead with the revelations with the aim of “save people’s lives, especially in the southern territory of the globe”, where, he believes, reside the populations most threatened by Facebook’s strategy of prioritizing revenue at the expense of people’s well-being. “If I had not released these documents, they would never have seen the daylight“he stated.
In addition to the proliferation of hate speech and misinformation, with dire and direct consequences in the democratic processes, another of the most highlighted aspects after the disclosure of the contents had to do with the impact of Instagram publications on adolescent girls mental health, another aspect that will also be known by the company, but which it chooses to ignore.
Facebook’s response has always been to deny the allegations, categorizing the news as a “collective effort to use specially selected stolen documents to build a false narrative from the company”.
This week, at a meeting with investors, Mark Zuckerberg said that the main problems facing the company are not related to issues related to “social media” per se, but to “polarization that started to grow in the United States” even before the millionaire was born.
