Facebook VP of global affairs Nick Clegg told staffers in an memo on Saturday to 'steel [themselves] for more bad headlines in the coming days' as a cadre of news outlets begin to print fresh claims from whistleblower Frances Haugen.
Clegg, who was previously the UK's Deputy Prime Minister, warned in the email that new coverage may contain 'mischaracterizations of our research, our motives and where our priorities lie,' and told employees to 'listen and learn from criticism when it is fair, and push back strongly when its not.'
'But above all else,' he wrote to Facebook staffers, according to Axios, 'We should keep our heads held high and do the work we came here to do.'
He spoke as two dozen outlets which obtained fresh revelations from Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen broke an embargo set to expire Monday, and began printing fresh revelations.
Those included the social network struggling to work out exactly how many active users it has, and the fact that Facebook is so afraid of being seen to have a liberal bias that it 'bends over backwards' to avoid imposing its own rules on conservative publishers.
Nick Clegg (pictured, Facebook's VP of Global Affairs who was previously the UK's Deputy Prime Minister, warned in the email that new coverage may contain 'mischaracterizations of our research, our motives and where our priorities lie,' and told employees to 'listen and learn from criticism when it is fair, and push back strongly when its not'
Facebook was also found to have lifted its rules aimed at suppressing 'misinformation' too soon after the 2020 presidential election, with that move blamed for helping stoke the January 6 riots as Donald Trump supporters flooded its network with propaganda.
Clegg went on to remind Facebook staff that the company has made investments toward safety and security, including efforts to boost voting and vaccinations rates.
'The truth is we’ve invested $13 billion and have over 40,000 people to do one job: keep people safe on Facebook,' he wrote.
Haugen, a former product manager on Facebook's civic misinformation team, left the company with tens of thousands of confidential documents that she copied in secret.
On October 5, she testified before congress, calling for more transparency surrounding the company's morally questionable methods that keep users scrolling, and said executives have 'no desire' to run the company in a way that protects the public from the consequences of harmful content.
Haugen testified, and backed up with documents, that Facebook was acutely aware of its negative effect on teen girls' body images and its platform's role in human trafficking, and that the platform had a list of elite users that weren't governed by the same posting rules that applied to other users.
Since, Facebook has announced plans to rename its parent company as the series of scandals has left its reputation bruised: Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg is set to reveal the parent company's new name at its annual Connect conference on October 28, but it could well be leaked before then.
The eponymous social media platform will still be called Facebook, but the parent
