Facebook Inc on Monday announced more than US$9 billion in quarterly profits, hours after a US news collective published reports arguing that the company prioritizes its growth over people’s safety.
The social media giant has been battling a fresh crisis since former employee Frances Haugen leaked reams of internal studies showing that executives knew of the sites’ potential for harm, prompting a renewed US push for regulation.
Facebook released results showing its profit in the third quarter grew to US$9.2 billion — a 17 percent increase — and its ranks of users increased to 2.91 billion.
Photo: Reuters
Facebook executives said on an earnings call that the tech titan would have brought in even more money if not for Apple Inc updating its iPhone operating system to thwart advertisers tracking app users for ad targeting without permission.
“Overall, if it wasn’t for Apple’s iOS 14 changes, we would have seen positive quarter-over-quarter revenue growth,” Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg said of the iPhone software tweak made in the name of protecting privacy.
Hours earlier, new reports blamed Facebook chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg for his platform bending to state censors in Vietnam, accused Facebook of allowing hate speech to flourish internationally due to linguistic shortcomings and said it knew its algorithm fueled polarization online.
“These damning documents underscore that Facebook leadership chronically ignored serious internal alarms, choosing to put profits over people,” US Senator Richard Blumenthal said in a statement.
News organizations such as the New York Times, the Washington Post and Wired were among those that have now received access to the set of internal Facebook documents that Haugen originally leaked to US authorities and which were the basis of a Wall Street Journal series.
Facebook has said that the reporting was an effort to cast the social network in an inaccurate light.
“Good-faith criticism helps us get better, but 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,” Zuckerberg said in an earnings call.
Haugen, who testified on social media before British lawmakers on Monday, has repeatedly said that the company puts its continuous growth, and thus profits, before the well-being and safety of users.
“Facebook has been unwilling to accept even little slivers of profit being sacrificed for safety, and that’s not acceptable,” she told the lawmakers, adding that angry or hate-fueled content “is the easiest way to grow” the social media platform.
The Washington Post on Monday reported that Zuckerberg had personally signed off on a push from Vietnam’s government to limit the spread of so-called “anti-state” posts.
A Politico report called the documents a “treasure trove for Washington’s anti-trust fight” against the platform, revealing internal employee chats about Facebook’s global dominance.
One of Monday’s reports, from Web site The Verge, plunged into the company’s own worries for its future.
“Teenage users of the Facebook app in the US had declined by 13 percent since 2019 and were projected to drop 45 percent over the next two years, driving an overall decline in daily users in the company’s most lucrative ad market,” the story said, citing internal company research.
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