Mark Zuckerberg — his fortunes falling and criticism mounting over Facebook's treatment of critics and its response to Russian election meddling — is pushing back.
In an interview with CNN Business' Laurie Segall posted Tuesday, the Facebook CEO conceded, "A lot of the criticism around the biggest issues has been fair."
"But I do think that if we are going to be real, there is this bigger picture as well, which is that we have a different world view than some of the folks who are covering us," he said.
"There are big issues, and I'm not trying to say that there aren't," he said. "But I do think that sometimes, you can get the flavor from some of the coverage that that's all there is, and I don't think that that's right either."
The interview came after The New York Times reported the company appeared to have tried to ignore and conceal Russian interference on its platform — and hired a public relations firm to dig up dirt on its competitors.
"A lot of the things that were in that report, we talked to the reporters ahead of time and told them that from everything that we'd seen, that wasn't true and they chose to print it anyway," he said.
When asked if he regrets not being more transparent about Russian meddling, Zuckerberg said, "I wish that we understood the issues sooner. I wish we understood it before 2016, before the Russians tried to do these information operations in the first place."
He also was pressed about the Times report that revealed Facebook's aggressive lobbying campaign to combat critics, its hiring of a GOP opposition-research firm to discredit activist protesters by linking them to liberal financier George Soros, and its lobbying of a Jewish civil rights group to cast criticism of the company as anti-Semitic.
"Does that strike you as stooping low?" Segall asked.
Zuckerberg responded he "wasn't particularly happy about that piece of it."
But he also made it clear he does not plan to step down as chairman.
"That's not the plan," he said.
Even before the Times investigation, Zuckerberg and Facebook struggled to move past a series of crises, including Russian election meddling, the data-sharing scandal with Cambridge Analytica, and a massive security break impacting tens of millions of users.
Facebook stock has dropped 40 percent from its all-time high in July, CNN Business reported.
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