Mark Zuckerberg is trying to portray his social media platform as a victim after a former employee accused it of prioritizing profit over users' safety, former US intelligence contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden said on Wednesday.
"Zuckerberg responds to a global outage and national scandal by claiming @Facebook is the real victim here, and modestly proposing Congress consider: A) legally restricting teen use of internet services B) identify verification mandates C) limiting teen privacy," Snowden tweeted.
Similar proposals are tantamount to trying to invite Congress to "consider limiting teen secretion of tears," the whistleblower added.
The claim against the tech giant comes after Facebook suffered outage of more than six hours on Monday, which also disrupted some of its other services, including Instagram and WhatsApp. US media, citing Facebook’s recovery team, reported that the outage was caused by a border gateway protocol update.
Ex-Facebook product manager and whistleblower Frances Haugen told a congressional testimony on Tuesday that the social network was aware it inflicted harm on the mental health of teenagers but did not do much to prevent content promoting "hate and division", as well as content that created a toxic environment for teenage girls.
On Wednesday, Zuckerberg denied the allegations, saying that Facebook cared "deeply about issues like safety, well-being and mental health". Many of the accusations make no sense, he added, noting that if Facebook wanted to ignore harmful content, then its team would not create "an industry-leading research programme to understand these important issues in the first place" and employ more people dedicated to fighting this content than any other company in the field.