Mark Zuckerberg is tired of the damage caused by some on Facebook.
Yes, you read that right. In the announcement for the profits of the third quarter of his company, the CEO of Facebook "put" them with 17 news organizations that publish leaked internal documents, and are known as Facebook Papers.
The problem, as Zuckerberg described it, is not what is revealed in the reports, but the media witch-hunt that targets his good trillion-dollar company.
"Good reviews help us get better," said the indignant Zuckerberg, "but my view is that what we are seeing is a concerted effort to selectively use leaked documents to paint a false picture of our company."
Facebook has tried, and failed, to use this line of defense in the past to discredit posts it deemed unfavorable.
But previous failures have not stopped Zuckerberg from trying the same approach again. So citing the huge media conspiracy, Zuckerberg then turned to combining the fact that Facebook is doing internal investigations - the investigations leaked by the former Facebook employee, Frances Hagen - to take substantive action on the findings of the investigations.
3 years ago today, 30+ journalists published a coordinated series of articles about Facebook's "war room" for election interference. To get inside it, outlets had to agree to FB's conditions & schedule
FB shuttered the war room a few weeks later once it'd gotten press coverage https://t.co/24HRoioGAa pic.twitter.com/d1HrtbEhnd
- paris martineau (@parismartineau) October 18, 2021
"The reality is that we have an open culture where we encourage discussion and research in our work, so that we can make progress on many complex issues that do not only concern us," he said. "We have the best research programs to study the impact of our products and provide transparency in our progress ”.
It is worth noting that we know that researchers employed by Facebook have tried again and again to persuade the Facebook leadership to act on their findings - often to no avail.
The CEO of Facebook also took some time to inform everyone who listens to him that this issue of polarization has nothing to do with him personally.
"Polarization began to increase in the United States before I was born," said Zuckerberg, who is unhappy with the allegations.
In the end, the CEO wanted everyone who hates the company to understand that no concerted effort is going to slow him down.
"We can not change the underlying media dynamics, but there is a different region we serve, which has always been more important and which I try to focus on," he said before pausing somewhat dramatically, to say "and this is the world."