Mark Zuckerberg is sick and tired of all the harm caused to Facebook.
Yes, you read that correctly. At the top of his company’s third quarter earnings call, the Facebook CEO broadly railed against the 17 news organizations working together to report on a massive trove of leaked internal documents dubbed the Facebook Papers. The problem, as Zuckerberg described it, is not the multiple terrors revealed by the reporting, but rather the media witch hunt targeting his well meaning trillion-dollar company.
“Good faith criticism helps us get better,” huffed the clearly indignant Zuckerberg, “but my view is that what we are seeing is a coordinated effort to selectively use leaked documents to paint a false picture of our company.”
Facebook has tried, and failed, to use this line of attack before to discredit reporting it views as unfavorable. On Oct. 18, the company’s PR team was roundly mocked for railing against media outlets agreeing to an embargo — a standard journalist practice that Facebook itself routinely asks of reporters.
But past failure didn’t stop Zuckerberg from trying the approach once more. With his broadside against the vast media conspiracy out of the way, Zuckerberg then pivoted to conflating the fact that Facebook does internal research — the very research leaked by Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen — with taking meaningful action on the findings of that research.
“The reality is that we have an open culture where we encourage discussion and research about our work so we can make progress on many complex issues that are not specific to just us,” he dissembled. “We have industry-leading programs to study the effects of our products and provide transparency to our progress.”
Notably, we know that Facebook-employed researchers tried time and time again to get Facebook leadership to act on their findings — often to little or no avail.
Oh, and seemingly for good measure, Zuckerberg also took a moment to let everyone listening know that this polarization thing has little if anything to do with him personally.
“Polarization started rising in the U.S. before I was born,” he stressed in a definitely not-protesting-too-much kind of way.
In the end, the CEO wanted any and all haters to understand that no coordinated effort is going to slow him down.
SEE ALSO: 5 damning revelations from the Facebook Papers
“We can’t change the underlying media dynamic, but there is a different constituency that we serve that has always been more important and that I try to keep in focus,” he said before pausing dramatically, “and that’s people.”
That’s right, insisted Zuckerberg, Facebook cares about people — his own company’s documents to the contrary be damned.
