British Parliament has published unredacted internal Facebook emails in which leaders of the tech giant discussed limiting capabilities for other companies in order to weed out competition.
“The files show evidence of Facebook taking aggressive positions against apps, with the consequence that denying them access to data led to the failure of that business,” Parliament member Damian Collins wrote in the summary of key issues.
In one example, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg approved a plan in 2013 to restrict an application, just one day after it launched, from accessing data and in turn made it harder for users of the app to connect with Facebook friends.
This particular app, Vine, has since shuttered its operation and is no longer available in the app store.
“Twitter launched Vine today which lets you shoot multiple short video segments to make one single, 6-second video,” Facebook vice president Justin Osofsky wrote to Zuckerberg in an email Jan. 24, 3013. “As part of their NUX, you can find friends via FB. Unless anyone raises objections, we will shut down their friends API access today. We’ve prepared reactive PR, and I will let Jana know our decision.”
“Yup, go for it,” Zuckerberg said.
Other similar examples can be found throughout the so-called Six4Three files.
Facebook defended many of its previous decisions in a statement Wednesday that said the social media platform was operating under Facebook policies at the time that protected it against competitors.
A day before the emails were publicly released, however, Facebook changed the policy.
“As part of our ongoing review, we have decided that we will remove this out-of-date policy so that our platform remains as open as possible. We think this is the right thing to do as platforms and technology develop and grow,” the statement said.
Zuckerberg also responded to the release of documents and internal emails in a Facebook post, claiming that “these emails were only part of our discussions.”
In the post, he said a lot of the decisions made by Facebook are made in order to block and remove “sketchy apps” from obtaining Facebook users’ data.
[Also read: Facebook confirms it asked opposition research firm ‘to do work on George Soros’]
