“Once the tests began, Facebook used a system known as Quick Promotes to place stories about people and organizations that used the social network into users’ News Feeds, they said,” the article explained. “People essentially see posts with a Facebook logo that link to stories and websites published by the company and from third-party local news sites. One story pushed “Facebook’s Latest Innovations for 2021” and discussed how it was achieving ‘100 percent renewable energy for our global operations.’”
Despite this alarming report, Facebook spokesperson Joe Osbourne told the publication Project Amplify is “similar to corporate responsibility initiatives people see in other technology and consumer products.” “This is a test for an informational unit clearly marked as coming from Facebook,” he continued.
3. To Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg, Denial is more than a river in Egypt.
Considering its alleged new dedication to hyping itself up on our timelines almost as much as it does those really gross cooking videos, Facebook, naturally, denied all of these claims, tapping Nick Clegg, the company’s Vice President of Global Affairs to pen a scathing statement slamming the series.
“A lot has been said about Facebook this week,” wrote Clegg, who also served as the UK’s former deputy prime minister, in a post on the company’s site entitled “What the Wall Street Journal Got Wrong.” “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. These are serious and complex issues, and it is absolutely legitimate for us to be held to account for how we deal with them. 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.”