A Facebook executive's memo that claimed the “ugly truth” was that anything it did to grow was justified has been made public, embarrassing the company.
The 2016 post said that this applied even if it meant people might die as a result of bullying or terrorism.
Both the author and the company's chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, have denied they actually believe the sentiment.
But it risks overshadowing the firm's efforts to tackle an earlier scandal.
Facebook has been under intense scrutiny since it acknowledged that it had received reports that a political consultancy – Cambridge Analytica – had not destroyed data harvested from about 50 million of its users years earlier.
The memo was first made public by the Buzzfeed news site, and was written by Andrew Bosworth.
The 18 June 2016 memo:
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 co-ordinated 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. It is…
