After a former Facebook Inc. executive blew the whistle on the company, Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg emerged from the dust today to deny her accusations.

Frances Haugen, a product manager on the civic integrity team at Facebook, had leaked a series of documents to the Wall Street Journal before she appeared on U.S. television to disclose her identity and roundly criticize Facebook for prioritizing profit over safety – a narrative Facebook has always tried to counter.

Soon after, Haugen testified in front of Congress in relation to the thousands of documents she had copied before leaving the company that she says prove that Facebook’s business model ends up causing harm to society.

Today Zuckerberg took to his own Facebook page to try to combat the storm he’s found himself in, first talking about this week’s global outage, and then getting to Haugen’s conviction that Facebook isn’t a very ethical entity.

“We care deeply about issues like safety, well-being and mental health,” Zuckerberg wrote. “It’s difficult to see coverage that misrepresents our work and our motives. At the most basic level, I think most of us just don’t recognize the false picture of the company that is being painted.”

He went on, saying some of the contentions just “don’t make any sense,” asking why Facebook would create research programs on possible harms if it didn’t care about possible harms. He added, “At the heart of these accusations is this idea that we prioritize profit over safety and well-being. That’s just not true.”

Zuckerberg also doesn’t believe that Facebook and other social media can be blamed for polarizing the U.S. He wrote that other countries haven’t become polarized but those countries also have a large number of people using social media. In short, making money from distributing nasty and divisive content is not something Facebook embraces.

“The argument that we deliberately push content that makes people angry for profit is deeply illogical,” he said. “We make money from ads, and advertisers consistently tell us they don’t want their ads next to harmful or angry content. And I don’t know any tech company that sets out to build products that make people angry or depressed.”

The leaked documents also suggest that Facebook knew about the psychological harm it might cause to young people but decided to downplay that harm. That’s one reason why Instagram Kids has just been put on hold. To this, Zuckerberg reiterated the line Facebook has already presented.

“The reality is that young people use technology,” he said. “Think about how many school-age kids have phones. Rather than ignoring this, technology companies should build experiences that meet their needs while also keeping them safe.”

Despite these contentions, it’s looking like this is going to be one of Facebook’s hardest battles yet.

Photo: Christoph Scholz/Flickr