The truth is that research into the impact social media has on people is still relatively nascent and evolving, and social media itself is changing rapidly. Similarly, to suggest that the research community is settled in its view on the intersection between social media and well-being is simply not the case. The Journal article goes on to discuss at length how pro-vaccine posts are undermined by negative comments, once again burying a crucial point: that health organizations continue posting because their own measurements show how their posts on our platforms effectively promote vaccines, despite negative comments. For example, to suggest that misinformation has somehow overwhelmed our COVID-19 vaccine response ignores the most important fact: that vaccine hesitancy among Facebook’s US users has declined by about 50% since January. At the same time, none of these issues can be solved by technology companies alone, which is why we work in close partnership with researchers, regulators, policymakers and others.īut none of that collaborative work is helped by taking a deliberately lop-sided view of the wider facts. The fact that not every idea that a researcher raises is acted upon doesn’t mean Facebook teams are not continually considering a range of different improvements. With any research, there will be ideas for improvement that are effective to pursue and ideas where the tradeoffs against other important considerations are worse than the proposed fix. 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. 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.
#WALL STREET JOURNAL SERIES#
But these stories have contained deliberate mischaracterizations of what we are trying to do, and conferred egregiously false motives to Facebook’s leadership and employees.Īt 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.
These are serious and complex issues, and it is absolutely legitimate for us to be held to account for how we deal with them. A series of articles published by the Wall Street Journal has focused on some of the most difficult issues we grapple with as a company - from content moderation and vaccine misinformation, to algorithmic distribution and the well-being of teens. A lot has been said about Facebook this week.
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