Facebooks Mark Zuckerberg refutes whistleblower’s claims

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Mark Zuckerberg hit back at the whistleblower who said the Facebook CEO had no responsibility during a Senate hearing on Tuesday.

Zuckerberg said the company FB, + 2.06% he founded, cares deeply about issues such as safety, well-being and mental health after former employee Frances Haugen urged lawmakers to ask government regulators to oversee the social network, which she says should declare moral bankruptcy.

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Haugen, who leaked thousands of internal documents to lawmakers and the Wall Street Journal, said the company downplayed Instagram’s negative effects on adolescent mental health, exempted popular users from content rules and failed failed to crack down on drug cartels and human traffickers.

Read: As Facebook faces fire, US laws protecting children online languish behind Europe

There are no such powerful companies that are unilaterally controlled [as Facebook], testified Haugen. The responsibility ends with Mark. There is no one currently holding Mark responsible except himself.

Zuckerberg, 37, refuted the allegations in a letter to employees he released on Tuesday, writing that hearing coverage distorts our work and our motives.

If we don’t care about tackling harmful content, then why would we hire as many dedicated people as any other company in our space, even bigger than us? Zuckerberg wrote.

If we wanted to hide our results, why would we have set a leading standard for transparency and reporting on what was being done?

Zuckerberg also noted that social media is not contributing to the polarization of countries outside of the United States, where the vast majority of its nearly three billion users live.

The comments marked the first time the Silicon Valley big boss has seriously addressed Haugens’ leakage and national security concerns regarding Facebook, where she worked from June 2019 to May 2020 reading and copying internal documents.

Zuckerberg also commented on Monday on the widespread outage of Facebook and its Instagram and WhatsApp products, which devalued the company by $ 50 billion.

We have spent the last 24 hours debriefing on how we can strengthen our systems against this type of failure, said the CEO of the worst outage we have seen in years.

It was also a reminder of the importance of our work for the people who rely on our services to communicate with their loved ones, run their business or support their community.

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