I said this this morning and I'll say it again: There's a lot of indefensible stuff Facebook has done in the past 5-10 years that they rightly deserve to be criticized and called out for. The NYT is an esteemed news publication with a history of excellence and their coverage of FB and the other tech giants is important and something that should be extended in the interest of protecting individual privacy for unscrupulous actors.

That said, dishonest reporting for unknown agendas only hurts and delegitimizes this cause. At a news organization with the stature and editorial resources of NYT, narratives are no accident. Every word is meaningfully articulated and scrutinized before it goes it's published. NYT's decision to create a narrative for their largely technologically illiterate readership that Netflix, Spotify, and RBC could unilaterally control and access private user messages is not only disappointing and unnecessary, but harmful to their credibility and to the overall goal of holding FB accountable.

P.S. To whichever admin flagged this as a dupe, as far as I can tell this story has not been submitted. FB released two statements today:

[1] https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/12/facebooks-messaging-par...

[2] https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/12/facebooks-partners/

I don't believe this one has been posted (according to a quick search).