Facebook[1] on Friday struck back against scientific researchers and tech industry insiders who have criticised the world's biggest social media network and its competitors for transforming how people behave and express emotion.
Facebook, in a corporate blog post, said that social media can be good for people's well-being if they use the technology in a way that is active, such as messaging with friends, rather than passive, such as scrolling through a feed of other people's posts.
It was the second time this week that Facebook had published such a rebuttal, signalling a new willingness to defend a business model that translates users' attention into advertising revenue.
On Tuesday, the company released a statement saying that former executive Chamath Palihapitiya, who at a conference publicly blamed Facebook for "destroying how society works," had been gone for six years and was unfamiliar with the company's recent efforts to improve.
Palihapitiya on Thursday revised his view, writing in a Facebook post that the service "is a force for good in the world."
Online services such as Facebook and its Instagram unit, Twitter[2], Snap's Snapchat[3] and Alphabet's YouTube[4] are under attack for their seemingly addictive nature and perceived promotion of anti-social behaviours.
A study in March by US researchers found that using such services at least two hours daily was correlated with reporting feelings of social isolation.
A nonprofit organization called Time Well Spent, led by a former Google design ethicist, is pressuring tech companies to move away from products that try to hook people's attention.
In its blog post, Facebook acknowledged what it called "compelling research" on the negative effects of social media and cited two such academic studies.
The company said, though,...