Zuckerberg disavows memo pushing user growth above all else

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Thursday issued a statement condemning an internal memo issued by his longtime business partner that appeared to rationalize prioritizing the website’s explosive user growth above ethical concerns.

In a statement reported by Reuters, Zuckerberg stood by Facebook executive Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, his longtime friend and fellow Harvard student, while distancing himself from the memo’s contents.

“Boz is a talented leader who says many provocative things. This was one that most people at Facebook including myself disagreed with strongly. We’ve never believed the ends justify the means,” Zuckerberg said.

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Bosworth wrote in a newly revealed memo from 2016 that “all the work we do in growth is justified,” despite raising hypothetical scenarios that the site’s software could be used by malicious groups to perform a terrorist attack or to connect children to bullies.

The contents of the memo were published by BuzzFeed earlier Thursday.

“So we connect more people,” Bosworth wrote. “That can be bad if they make it negative. Maybe it costs someone a life by exposing someone to bullies.”

“Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools,” he added.

Bosworth himself dismissed the remarks in a statement on his Twitter account Thursday after the article published, stating that he did not support those views even when he penned the memo.

“I don’t agree with the post today and I didn’t even when I wrote it,” Bosworth wrote, declining to criticize specifics in the post. “To see this post in isolation is rough because it makes it appear as a stance that I hold or that the company holds when neither is the case.”

Publication of the memo came as the latest part of a string of negative news stories for Facebook, which is facing widespread international criticism after it was revealed that 50 million Facebook users had their personal information gathered without their consent by Cambridge Analytica, a data firm that worked for the Trump campaign.

Zuckerberg has issued a public apology to Facebook’s users over the scandal, and is expected to testify before Congress in the coming weeks.