Dispatches proved site gets boost from bad content, says FF
THE recent controversial Dispatches documentary was the ‘smoking gun’ that substantiates the shocking claims made by a high-ranking Facebook executive that the company uses negative content to boost share price, Fianna Fáil has said.
The Channel 4 programme had claimed that violent content had remained on the site, despite being flagged by users as inappropriate.
And prior to this, in 2016, Andrew ‘Boz’ Bosworth, a highly regarded figure in the company to this day, published an internal memo entitled ‘The Ugly Truth’, which was leaked online earlier this year.
In it, he wrote: ‘So we connect more people. That can be bad if they make it negative. Maybe it costs someone a life by exposing someone to bullies. Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools.’ Later, he added: ‘The ugly truth is we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is de facto good.
‘It is perhaps the only area where the metrics do tell the true story as far as we are concerned. That isn’t something we are doing for ourselves. Or for our stock price (ha!). It is literally just what we do. We connect people. Period.’
Quizzed on the statement before an Oireachtas committee yesterday, and how it could be reconciled with the Dispatches revelations, the head of public policy for Facebook Ireland, Niamh Sweeney, said: ‘I think a lot of us would like to go back and hit delete before he ever managed to send that.
‘His views as expressed in that post absolutely do not represent the views of the company. We’d never stand over them and it was taken up with him at the very highest level by Mark Zuckerberg. What I’d say is that “Boz”... has a reputation for sort of posting provocative things to get a conversation going. That’s my understanding of what happened here.
‘So I don’t think it actually represents Andrew Bosworth’s views, but I can understand why you’ve raised it here today. It’s a difficult one for us to talk about but I can promise you it definitely doesn’t represent the company’s views.’
Following the committee meeting, Fianna Fáil communications spokesman Timmy Dooley TD, dismissed the explanation, and told the Irish Daily Mail the claims in the memo are now backed up by the Dispatches revelations.
He said: ‘Facebook has repeatedly tried to play down this memo ... that he didn’t really mean it and that he was somehow just playing devil’s advocate, that he was thinking out loud or something.
‘To my mind, what we saw in the Dispatches programme was the smoking gun. The evidence in that programme substantiated what was contained in Bosworth’s memo.’ Mr Dooley also said he had ‘some sympathy’ for the two Facebook executives before the committee yesterday.
‘They were left in the very difficult position of trying to explain that what we saw on Channel 4 Dispatches was all some kind of mistake,’ he said.
Programme ‘was smoking gun’