Facebook continued its pushback on Monday against what it called “mischaracterisation” by the media over the “Facebook Files” series of Wall Street Journal exposes that allegedly reveal internal documents broadly holding the company accountable for prioritising its own growth over the safety of users. In a carefully crafted response posted from the Facebook Newsroom Twitter handle to fend off the bad press, the company accused media organisations of reportage which “misrepresents” its actions and motivations.

“We expect the press to hold us accountable, given our scale and role in the world,” Facebook communications VP John Pinette said. “But when reporting misrepresents our actions and motivations, we believe we should correct the record.”

“Right now 30+ journalists are finishing up a coordinated series of articles based on thousands of pages of leaked documents,” the company charged in the series of tweets. “We hear that to get the docs, outlets had to agree to the conditions and a schedule laid down by the PR team that worked on earlier leaked docs.”

Continuing its defense, Facebook said “a curated selection out of millions of documents” can in no way be used to draw “fair conclusions”. 

“Internally, we share work in progress and debate options,” it said. “Not every suggestion stands up to the scrutiny we must apply to decisions affecting so many people.”

In a rejoinder to the media organisations that Facebook claims are working on an “orchestrated campaign” against it, Pinette added, “To those news organisations who would like to move beyond an orchestrated ‘gotcha’ campaign, we are ready to engage on the substance.”

Notably, American media outlet Wall Street Journal is releasing a series of exposes based on material provided by Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, a former product manager on the civic integrity team at the tech company. Haugen, who left the company earlier this year, said she copied a series of internal memos and documents before departing and shared them with the WSJ; the batches of exposes have become infamous as “The Facebook Files”.

In the most recent entry of the series, the publication claimed, citing the leaked documents, that Facebook’s own engineers have doubts about how successful artificial intelligence will be in cleaning up hate speech and excessive violence on the platform, despite the company’s stated intention being so.

“Facebook’s AI can’t consistently identify first-person shooting videos, racist rants and even, in one notable episode that puzzled internal researchers for weeks, the difference between cockfighting and car crashes,” the latest WSJ report says.

Meanwhile, responding to the series of allegations, Facebook said, “Over the last 6 weeks, including over the weekend, we’ve seen how documents can be mischaracterised. Obviously, not every employee at Facebook is an executive; not every opinion is the company’s position.”