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17-09-2021, 09:40 AM
By Allison Morrow, CNN Business
Updated 1808 GMT (0208 HKT) September 16, 2021
New York (CNN Business)This week the Wall Street Journal released a series of scathing articles about Facebook, citing leaked internal documents that detail in remarkably frank terms how the company is not only well aware of its platforms' negative effects on users but also how it has repeatedly failed to address them.
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In the Journal's report on Instagram's impact on teens, it cites Facebook's own researchers' slide deck, stating the app harms mental health.
"We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls," said one slide from 2019, according to the WSJ.
Another reads: "Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression ... This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups."
Those slides are particularly notable because Facebook has often referenced external studies, rather than its own researchers' findings, in arguing that there's little correlation between social media use and depression.
......
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has repeatedly, publicly maintained that Facebook is a neutral platform that puts its billions of users on equal footing. But in another report on the company's "whitelisting" practice — a policy that allows politicians, celebrities and other public figures to flout the platform's rules — the WSJ found a 2019 internal review that called Facebook out for misrepresenting itself in public.
"We are not actually doing what we say we do publicly," the review said, according to the paper. "Unlike the rest of our community, these people" — those on the whitelist — "can violate our standards without any consequences."
......
In 2018, Zuckerberg said a change in Facebook's algorithm was intended to improve interactions among friends and family and reduce the amount of professionally produced content in their feeds. But according to the documents published by the Journal, staffers warned the change was having the opposite effect: Facebook was becoming an angrier place.
A team of data scientists put it bluntly: "Misinformation, toxicity and violent content are inordinately prevalent among reshares," they said, according to the Journal's report.
"Our approach has had unhealthy side effects on important slices of public content, such as politics and news," the scientists wrote. "This is an increasing liability," one of them wrote in a later memo cited by WSJ.
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/09/16/busin...index.html
Updated 1808 GMT (0208 HKT) September 16, 2021
New York (CNN Business)This week the Wall Street Journal released a series of scathing articles about Facebook, citing leaked internal documents that detail in remarkably frank terms how the company is not only well aware of its platforms' negative effects on users but also how it has repeatedly failed to address them.
......
In the Journal's report on Instagram's impact on teens, it cites Facebook's own researchers' slide deck, stating the app harms mental health.
"We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls," said one slide from 2019, according to the WSJ.
Another reads: "Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression ... This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups."
Those slides are particularly notable because Facebook has often referenced external studies, rather than its own researchers' findings, in arguing that there's little correlation between social media use and depression.
......
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has repeatedly, publicly maintained that Facebook is a neutral platform that puts its billions of users on equal footing. But in another report on the company's "whitelisting" practice — a policy that allows politicians, celebrities and other public figures to flout the platform's rules — the WSJ found a 2019 internal review that called Facebook out for misrepresenting itself in public.
"We are not actually doing what we say we do publicly," the review said, according to the paper. "Unlike the rest of our community, these people" — those on the whitelist — "can violate our standards without any consequences."
......
In 2018, Zuckerberg said a change in Facebook's algorithm was intended to improve interactions among friends and family and reduce the amount of professionally produced content in their feeds. But according to the documents published by the Journal, staffers warned the change was having the opposite effect: Facebook was becoming an angrier place.
A team of data scientists put it bluntly: "Misinformation, toxicity and violent content are inordinately prevalent among reshares," they said, according to the Journal's report.
"Our approach has had unhealthy side effects on important slices of public content, such as politics and news," the scientists wrote. "This is an increasing liability," one of them wrote in a later memo cited by WSJ.
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/09/16/busin...index.html
