A Facebook executive's memo that claimed the "ugly truth" was that anything it did to grow was justified has been made public, embarrassing the company.
Photo: AFP
The 2016 post said that this applied even if it meant people might die as a result of bullying or terrorism.
Both the author and the company's chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, have denied they actually believe the sentiment.
But it risks overshadowing the firm's efforts to tackle an earlier scandal.
Facebook has been under intense scrutiny since it acknowledged that it had received reports that a political consultancy - Cambridge Analytica - had not destroyed data harvested from about 50 million of its users years earlier.
The memo was first made public by the Buzzfeed news site, and was written by Andrew Bosworth.
The 18 June 2016 memo:
So we connect more people.
That can be bad if they make it negative. Maybe it costs a life by exposing someone to bullies. Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack co-ordinated on our tools.
And still we connect people.
The ugly truth is that we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is *de facto* good. It is perhaps the only area where the metrics do tell the true story as far as we are concerned.
[...]
That's why all the work we do in growth is justified. All the questionable contact importing practices. All the subtle language that helps people stay searchable by friends. All of the work we do to bring more communication in. The work we will likely have to do in China some day. All of it.
Read the post in full.
Mr Bosworth - who co-invented Facebook's News Feed - has held high-level posts at the social network since 2006, and is currently in charge of its virtual reality efforts.
Mr Bosworth has since tweeted that he "didn't agree" with the post at the time he had posted it, but he had shared it with staff to be "provocative."
"Having a debate around hard topics like these is a critical part of our process and to do that effectively we have to be able to consider even bad ideas," he added.
Mark Zuckerberg has issued his own statement.
"Boz is a talented leader who says many provocative things," it said.
"This was one that most people at Facebook including myself disagreed with strongly. We've never believed the ends justify the means."
A follow-up report by the Verge revealed that dozens of Facebook's employees have subsequently used its internal chat tools to discuss concerns that such material had been leaked to the media.
- BBC