In 2016, a top Facebook executive wrote in an internal company memo that said Facebook may be used to coordinate terrorist attacks and that it might cause deaths from bullying, but that those effects were justified in the name of corporate growth.
After BuzzFeed published the memo on Thursday, the executive, Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, VP of consumer hardware, claimed that he didn’t agree with his own statements, even as he wrote them. “The purpose of this post, like many others I have written internally, was to bring to the surface issues I felt deserved more discussion with the broader company,” he said.
The memo written by Bosworth, who joined Facebook as an engineer in 2006, also claimed the company’s questionable data collection practices were justified in the name of “connecting people.”
“So we connect more people. That can be bad if they make it negative. Maybe it costs a life by exposing someone to bullies. Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools,” he wrote in 2016. “And still we connect people.”
