A leak to the WSJ is interesting: I can’t imagine that who opposed what feature could possibly come from anyone not inside (and high up) the company. Even internally, those arguments rarely leave the product review, and that’s at most a third of the executive committee, the product owner, maybe a couple of members of the team and some directors in between. Leaking features before release, or worst, cancelled features, that was extremely frowned upon years ago. With the current tone in the media, I can’t imagine it’s imaginable. Either someone committed career suicide, or it came from higher up. I don’t know how to read the media to understand if that could help Facebook within an “us Facebook vs. Kaplan” narrative.
On the merit of the case, Joel Kaplan probably had a reasonable point: if the feature mostly flags conservative sources and not the NYTimes, it could incense the current pro-Trump movement further — even if one source is factual and the Daily Stormer is… well, far less so. I can’t imagine there were no ways around that, always offering a “correction” that might not contradict one but would clearly challenge far more point in the other, trigger it progressively, trying to understand the impact on far-right and more reasonable people etc. (Facebook recently published paper able to detect and automatically adapt a model to subtle controls like that.) A product like that would not be scrapped, not after the first product review, but asked to tweak some aspects. Either Kaplan has been consistently pushing against any version of it (and that would be mentioned more clearly) or there’s more to it.