Mark Zuckerberg Responds After Facebook Whistleblower Says Company Is 'Tearing Societies Apart'

In over 1,300 words, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg responded to whistleblower Frances Haugen's claim that the company ignored data showing its apps were harmful to users.

Zuckerberg, 37, posted his letter on Tuesday night, just hours after Haugen, a former Facebook product manager, testified before a Senate Commerce subcommittee and alleged that the company frequently chose to put "profits over people," according to CNN.

"Now that today's testimony is over, I wanted to reflect on the public debate we're in," Zuckerberg wrote in his letter after addressing the worldwide outages that affected Facebook services on Monday. "I'm sure many of you have found the recent coverage hard to read because it just doesn't reflect the company we know. We care deeply about issues like safety, well-being and mental health."

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"At the most basic level, I think most of us just don't recognize the false picture of the company that is being painted," he continued.

Over the weekend, Haugan appeared on 60 Minutes to reveal she was behind the leaked company documents that were given to lawmakers and became the source of a Wall Street Journal exposé on Facebook.

"When we live in an information environment that is full of angry, hateful, polarizing content, it erodes our civic trust, it erodes our faith in each other, it erodes our ability to want to care for each other," she told 60 Minutes. "The version of Facebook that exists today is tearing our societies apart and causing ethnic violence around the world."

The WSJ series alleged Facebook allowed the accounts of high-profile users to bypass its rules, allowing some to post material inciting violence or harassment; downplayed data that showed Instagram is harmful to young teens, namely girls; and made changes to its algorithm that made people "angrier," among other allegations.

Zuckerberg responded to some of the allegations in his letter.

"Many of the claims don't make any sense," he wrote. "If we wanted to ignore research, why would we create an industry-leading research program to understand these important issues in the first place? If we didn't care about fighting harmful content, then why would we employ so many more people dedicated to this than any other company in our space — even ones larger than us?"

He added: "If we wanted to hide our results, why would we have established an industry-leading standard for transparency and reporting on what we're doing? And if social media were as responsible for polarizing society as some people claim, then why are we seeing polarization increase in the US while it stays flat or declines in many countries with just as heavy use of social media around the world?"

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Zuckerberg, who founded the company in 2004 with a group of fellow Harvard University students, also shot back at claims that it intentionally promoted content that made people angry.

"The argument that we deliberately push content that makes people angry for profit is deeply illogical," Zuckerberg said. "We make money from ads, and advertisers consistently tell us they don't want their ads next to harmful or angry content. And I don't know any tech company that sets out to build products that make people angry or depressed. The moral, business and product incentives all point in the opposite direction."

After Haugan's testimony, both Democrat and Republican lawmakers agreed there was a need for new regulations to change how Facebook targets its users, according to the Associated Press.

"Our differences are very minor, or they seem very minor in the face of the revelations that we've now seen," said Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat from Connecticut. "I'm hoping we can move forward."