Org Report

George Polk Award for Business Reporting — "The Facebook Files"

Jan 2022 🇺🇸 Long Island University (George Polk Awards)

The George Polk Awards, administered by Long Island University, gave The Wall Street Journal its Business Reporting award for reporter Jeff Horwitz's 'Facebook Files' series. Trade-press coverage of the honor quoted the Polk citation describing the series as documenting how the company 'ignored internal findings' that its products were associated with anger, divisiveness, and extremism, protected drug cartels, human traffickers, and dictators, and were linked, for some teenage girls, to body-image concerns, anxiety, and depression. TechKids Foundation cites this award as third-party recognition, from an established journalism prize, of the specific reporting cataloged elsewhere in this library, and as further confirmation that Horwitz personally, not just The Wall Street Journal generally, is publicly credited for the work.

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CITATION

George Polk Awards (Long Island University). Business Reporting award to The Wall Street Journal for Jeff Horwitz's 'Facebook Files,' announced 2022 (honoring 2021 reporting); quoted in Roy J. Harris Jr., 'Pulitzer Preview: Jan. 6 Reporting, IRS and Facebook,' Poynter, April 26, 2022.

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Reporter Details Dark Inner Workings of Facebook — Jeff Horwitz at Harvard Kennedy School

In November 2021, weeks after the Facebook Files series ran, Jeff Horwitz discussed the 14-part investigation at a Harvard Kennedy School event moderated by professor Latanya Sweeney, covered by The Harvard Gazette. Horwitz recounted internal research in which the company's own staff associated Instagram use with worsened mental health for a share of teen girls; Facebook publicly stressed that the research was noncausal, a caveat Horwitz accepted while arguing it still represented 'the company's best understanding of reality.' He also described mitigation tools — such as limiting reshares and slowing the spread of the fastest-moving posts — that he said had already been built internally but were left undeployed. TechKids Foundation cites this as the lead reporter's own extended public account of the investigation, delivered at an academic forum, not as an independent study.

Nov 2021 🇺🇸 Harvard Kennedy School / The Harvard Gazette
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Apr 2025 🇺🇸 The Wall Street Journal
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Aug 2025 🇺🇸 Tech Policy Press
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Sep 2021 🇺🇸 NPR (Fresh Air)
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Apr 2018 🇱🇰 The New York Times (syndicated via New York Times News Service / WRAL)
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Aug 2018 🇩🇪 The New York Times (syndicated via New York Times News Service / WRAL)
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