'Maybe someone dies': Facebook VP's staff memo justified bullying, terrorism on social network


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In a 2016 employee memo that was leaked this week, a Facebook executive defended the company’s questionable data mining practices and championed the growth of social media at any cost – apparently even death.



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“Maybe it costs a life by exposing someone to bullies,” company vice president Andrew Bosworth wrote in the memo, according to BuzzFeed News, which published it Thursday. “Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools. And still we connect people. The ugly truth is that we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is *de facto* good.”


Facebook executive Andrew Bosworth.

Facebook executive Andrew Bosworth.


Photo: AP


Bosworth, who oversaw Facebook’s advertising and business platform at the time and is now in charge of the company’s virtual reality department, has acknowledged writing the message but said he intended only to start a debate. “I didn’t agree with it even when I wrote it,” he wrote on Twitter after BuzzFeed published its report.


Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, who is already facing a public relations crisis over accusations that the company mishandled millions of users’ private data, disavowed the memo.


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