ZUCKER-PUNCHED
FB chief rips press & leaker
An angry Mark Zuckerberg sought to beat back a torrent of bad press Monday as he accused whistleblowers and reporters of plotting against the company and touted better-than-expected third quarter earnings.
“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,” a heated Zuckerberg said in a call with investors.
Zuckerberg is fighting back against news reports about Facebook allegedly struggling to crack down on human trafficking, doing little to address hate speech and making mental-health issues worse for teen girls.
Whistleblower Frances Haugen and other critics have argued that the company let these issues fester as they prioritized growth — an assertion Zuckerberg defiantly rejected.
“It makes it a good sound bite to say that we don’t solve these impossible trade-offs because we’re just focused on making money, but the reality is these questions are not primarily about our business, but about balancing different difficult social values,” the CEO said. “We believe that our systems are the most effective at reducing harmful content across the industry.”
Zuckerberg even appeared to accuse ex-Facebook employee Haugen and journalists of unfairly punishing Facebook for studying the effects of its own platform.
“I worry about the incentives that we are creating for other companies to be as introspective as we’ve been,” said Zuckerberg in apparent reference to Haugen’s leak of Facebook’s internal studies.
But despite the turmoil, Facebook posted $3.22 in earnings per share during the third quarter, slightly outperforming analyst expectations of $3.19, according to Refinitiv. Shares spiked 3 percent in after-market trading on the news.
In a more immediate threat to the company’s bottom line than whistleblowers, Facebook is facing down Apple iOS privacy changes that limit Facebook’s access to the user data that it uses to target ads.
Even as the company’s advertising revenue surged 33 percent, to $28.3 billion, in the third quarter, Facebook acknowledged in its earnings release that the company will face “continued headwinds from Apple’s iOS 14 changes” in the future.
“The accuracy of our ad targeting decreased,” said Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg.
“Facebook continues to power through the storm with its motorization, but Apple iOS remains the dark clouds ahead,” Wedbush Securities managing director Dan Ives told The Post.
As part of Zuckerberg’s push into the “metaverse,” the company said that beginning next quarter, it would begin to report separate financials for “Facebook Reality Labs” — which includes its augmentedand virtual-reality business — and the “Family of Apps” such as Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.