Facebook claps back at the Wall Street Journal over reports of favoritism and mental health

The Wall Street Journal spent much of last week digging into Facebook over reports regarding Instagram’s effects on teen girls’ mental health, favoritism to high-profile users, and more.

Most of these reports come from internal documents and studies WSJ obtained, but now Facebook is coming in hot with a new blog post that looks to combat the damning reports from WSJ.

At the center of Facebook’s blog post is Vice President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg claiming WSJ’s claims of Facebook ignoring research is “just plain false” and that the conclusions the outlet came to can only be claimed by “cherry-picking” quotes and research.

In regards to COVID-19 and the large amounts of misinformation on the social network, Clegg notes that, once again, relevance is being purposely omitted. Clegg states that while it is a problem, WSJ left out the fact that vaccine hesitancy has dropped by nearly 50% on the platform since January of this year.

At the end of the day, many of these issues are simply too big for anyone to grasp. Social media has changed our world and in the grand scheme of things, is still relatively young. It’s going to take many years of research to fully grasp how it is changing things and what companies (and users) can do to make the experience a truly positive one.

Have any thoughts on this? Let us know down below in the comments or carry the discussion over to our Twitter or Facebook.

Editors’ Recommendations:

• Facebook ignores drug trafficking problems unless it absolutely has to step in
• The head of Instagram says death is necessary for social media to succeed
• People are now spending more time watching TikTok than YouTube
• Twitter is once again opening the floodgates for verification requests

Josiah Motley

Former KnowTechie editor.