Facebook denies allegations from damning New York Times story

In the wake of yesterday’s bombshell New York Times report, Facebook is defending itself from a multitude of allegations that appear in the story.

The company is outright denying its reported hesitation to investigate Russian interference on its platform during the 2016 presidential election, but several other allegations from the story have been explained by the company in a way that suggests they’re at least partially true.

Let’s start with the biggest allegation from the story: The claim that Facebook knew about Russian meddling on its platform earlier than it had previously stated. 

The New York Times reports that Facebook’s former chief security officer Alex Stamos began investigating Russian propaganda on the network with a small team in the spring of 2016. The story adds that Stamos and his team were ready to publish a report on the investigation in January 2017, but Facebook’s vice president for corporate public policy Joel Kaplan fought to scuttle and obfuscate the investigation’s results.

The report claims Kaplan was concerned the findings of the internal investigation would make Facebook appear to be biased against conservative viewpoints and Republicans.

Facebook said in a statement Thursday that this allegation is simply “not true.” 

Facebook cites Mark Zuckerberg’s sworn testimony to Congress in April, where the company’s founder said under oath, “Leading up to Election Day in November 2016, we detected and dealt with several threats with ties to Russia… We shut these accounts down for violating our policies.”

Facebook also denied the allegation by referring to a March tweet where Stamos said, “to be clear, the security team has never been prevented or discouraged from investigating any Russian activity by any executives.”

As for the allegation that the fear of conservative backlash prompted the company to leave then-candidate Donald Trump’s Muslim ban post up on the website, Facebook claims it let the post stand for different reasons.

“We did decide that President Trump’s comments on the Muslim ban, while abhorrent to many people, did not break our Community Standards,” Facebook said. The company added that the post was also newsworthy because Donald Trump was a candidate for office.

Facebook also reasserted that it is fully committed to fighting misinformation on the platform. “Mark and Sheryl have been deeply involved in the fight against false news and information operations on Facebook,” the company said. 

The New York Times reported that Facebook indirectly created fake news stories by hiring a third party — Definers Public Affairs — that published negative stories about Facebook’s competitors and critics via its affiliate conservative news website NTK Network. Facebook cut ties with the organization on Thursday.

The company also defended its position on the sex trafficking law Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA). “Sheryl championed this legislation because she believed it was the right thing to do,” the company said in regards to the claims that it supported the bill in order to appease lawmakers.

Finally, Facebook that Mark Zuckerberg was so angered by Apple CEO Tim Cook’s criticism of the social network, that the Facebook founder ordered company management to use Android phones only.

In its response, Facebook did not outright deny the assertion that Zuckerberg told employees to use Android phones over Apple’s iPhone and explained with a dig at Cook. The reason Zuckerberg encouraged Android use, the post says, is because Android is “the most popular operating system in the world.”