FACEBOOK is worth half a trillion dollars, but even when you’re on top, an insult can really sting.

On the heels of a surprisingly personal and revealing exchange with a prominent former executive, the executive has softened some of his criticisms, while Facebook made what is perhaps its fullest acknowledgment to date of the negative consequences of its massive global platform.

Facebook found itself scrambling again this week after the executive, Chamath Palihapitiya, said he felt “tremendous guilt”, about the products he built because they were addictive and were “ripping apart” society. Palihapitiya, a prominent and usually outspoken venture capitalist whose career was launched by his fortune and reputation as Facebook’s head of growth, made the comments at a Stanford University summit a month ago. The comments went viral when they were published on a technology website, The Verge.

Palihapitiya’s statements struck a nerve with Facebook, which originally responded with what some saw a personal attack. Executives then published a long blog post on Friday morning devoted to addressing long-standing questions about the harms of social media and describing the company’s extensive investments into researching the impact of the platform on the well-being of its two billion monthly users.

The executives referenced those criticisms while broadly acknowledging the negative impact of social media use — one of the few times the company has done so. At the same time, the executives made the case that the social network has good effects and that it cares about more than just likes, shares, and clicks.

Like many of its users, Facebook wants to be well liked

“Like everything in life, there are good ways to engage with something, and there are less good,” said David Ginsberg, Facebook’s director of research and a co-author of the post, in an interview. “What’s we’ve learned is that when you’re actively engaging with people you’re close to, having meaningful social interactions, that can actually lift your well-being, but if you’re just passively and endlessly scrolling on your news feed, and not engaging, that is not associated with higher well-being.”

The company’s former president Sean Parker also recently said the product was engineered to exploit human psychology by providing “a little dopamine hit every once in a while”. A former early investor and the company’s former privacy chief have also publicly expressed regrets.

“The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops we’ve created are destroying how society works,” said Palihapitiya, speaking of Facebook and other social media companies, during the Stanford talk. “No civil discourse, no cooperation; misinformation, mistruth. And it’s not an American problem — this is not about Russians ads. This is a global problem.”

Facebook has struggled to address these criticisms. First, the company shot back at Palihapitiya in strikingly personal terms, releasing a statement pointing out that

he had not worked at Facebook for over six years. The jab also included an admission: “Facebook was a very different company back then,” it read. “As we have grown we have realised how our responsibilities have grown too.”

The intensity of the back and forth shows the particular weight Silicon Valley companies, and particularly Facebook, place on loyalty and a shared sense of mission.

Facebook is flush with cash, but fears it could lose the hearts and minds of its workers, and the favour of lawmakers and the public. Like many Facebook users, the company wants to be liked. In the blog post on Friday, entitled ‘Is social media bad for us?’, Facebook described extensive efforts to design products and features that promote its users well-being.

In an interview, Roger McNamee, an early investor who has become a vocal critic of the company, said that Facebook has not made a broader shift. He pointed out that even the research Facebook highlighted seems to suggest that even basic use of the product can have a bad effect on people.

Behind the scenes, in a back and forth that played out during the week, executives told Palihapitiya they were disappointed by his statements and encouraged him to learn more about the company’s recent efforts, according to two people familiar with the discussions.

In a remorseful Facebook post, Palihapitiya said he did not intend to unleash a tide of anger. “My comments were meant to start an important conversation, not to criticise one company — particularly one I love,” he said.

Bloomberg/The Washington Post Service

Published in Dawn, The Business and Finance Weekly, December 18th, 2017