Facebook paid Daily Telegraph to run positive sponsored content

Facebook has been found to be paying the leading Britain based newspaper, the Daily Telegraph, to run sponsored content known as “Being human in the information age." Business Insider reported that "the British newspaper is running dozens of stories that defend Facebook on controversial subjects like terrorism, hate speech, and cyber-bullying."

Facebook's association with the Daily Telegraph

The association between Facebook and the Daily Telegraph has produced a series of articles.

According to Business Insider, "The series — called 'Being human in the information age' — has published 26 stories over the last month, to run in print and online, and is produced by Telegraph Spark, the newspaper’s sponsored content unit.

As of now, it's not entirely clear how much Facebook is paying the Daily Telegraph or even who is responsible for generating concepts for these sponsored stories.

Scandals surrounding Facebook

Facebook has come under scrutiny numerous times, primarily for being involved extensively in a long list of privacy scandals. Many of the accusations against Facebook were promoted massively by fake news websites.

The tech giant was also criticized for failing to respond, even after being given repeated warnings regarding the promotion of pro-genocide propaganda in Myanmar on its platform.

In Europe, Facebook and various other tech companies have been the victims of a severe backlash. The regulators in the EU passed the General Data Protection Regulation, also known as GDPR, which came into effect in 2018. However, the Australian regulators are one of the harshest critics of these social media giants. The country has been planning to pass a law that could impose jail time for tech executives who decline to remove violent content from platforms.

The sponsored series by Facebook with the British newspaper may have been the result of the hostile response that the company received by the members of parliament after it was found out that a UK based company called Cambridge Analytica was connected to Facebook's data scandal.

According to Business Insider India, "CEO Mark Zuckerberg reportedly told executives last year the company was at war with its critics, while Facebook hired a lobbying firm then accused of promoting conspiracy theories about billionaire philanthropist, Holocaust survivor, and Facebook critic George Soros."