Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t understand free speech in the 21st century
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
This was really apparent in the interview he did with Yuval Noah Harari. When Harari asked him what would happen if "connecting the world" wasn't actually a positive thing, Zuckerberg didn't really have a coherent answer other then going on about how free expression is always great and how it's in the American constitution or whatever.
That's something that I've noticed when a lot of these CEOs are interviewed or when one reads their books. You expect to encounter some profound insight but it is surprising how shallow, uneducated and out of their depth these people are when it comes to placing their companies in some historical or political context. It's like they've done nothing but trying to make money to the point where they've forgotten why they're doing anything, a bunch of facile PR slogans aside. No self-awareness, no reflection, no ability to consider the broad impact of their behaviour. The most philosophical you're going to get is likely a tract on the AI apocalypse.
If the world wasn't so keen on taking sound bites out of context, then maybe you could have CEOs give you meaningful answers about these questions in interviews. But the world does love their sound bites and thus the only thing they can say is PR-speak.
Imagine having a discussion about abortion where the other party can ask whatever contrived question they want and somebody will later pick and choose soundbites from your answers. What's the chance that you can properly defend your position without giving away soundbites that can make you sound like a lunatic? I think it's very low. You instead say something along the lines of "That is what I believe because we should respect X's rights" and then shift the topic slightly. That's what these CEOs are doing.
That's the most baffling part. Facebook is a closed platform, so they're not "connecting the world". They set the terms and rules. So I don't know how he is supposed to answer that. Because he's connecting the world, but in a way that has rules and boundaries about what speech is allowed.
So he's getting complaints on both sides, people that want it more open and less open. The pro-open ones don't like the control Facebook has and its size. The pro-closed ones don't like hate groups or politicians of one party or another on the platform.
And of course some people for whatever reason just don't like him personally, in which case facebook could never win
He will continue to cling to his creation well after the power goes out, the kids are missing and the Raptors and T-Rex are loose. Only problem is he hasn't been running this experiment on an island but on 2 billion lab rats. Whether they are Generals, Janitors, Journalists or Teenagers everyone is effected in ways no one fully understands yet.
So now we wait for more and more unintended consequences to mount. Because it's not like a Zuckerberg replacement is going to do any better. This is a problem that has only one solution.
Eventually the park will be shut down and be rebuilt after we understand the psychological and sociological dynamics such networks produces at scale. Right now his answer to Harari is incoherent because no one knows what the answer is. And it's impossible to figure it out while watching the current experiment gone of the rails.
Micheal Crichton however, did provide a possible answer to Harari's question 20 years ago - "I think cyberspace means the end of our species. It means the end of innovation. This idea that the whole world is wired together is mass death. Every biologist knows that small groups in isolation evolve fastest. You put a thousand birds on an ocean island and they'll evolve very fast. You put ten thousand on a big continent, and their evolution slows down. Now, for our own species, evolution occurs mostly through our behaviour. We innovate new behaviour to adapt. And everybody on earth knows that innovation only occurs in small groups. Put three people on a committee and they may get something done. Ten people, and it gets harder. Thirty people, and nothing happens. Thirty million, it becomes impossible. That's the effect of mass media - it keeps anything from happening. Mass media swamps diversity. It makes every place the same. Bangkok or Tokyo or London: there's a McDonald's on one corner, a Benetton on another, a Gap across the street. Regional differences vanish. All differences vanish. In a mass-media world, there's less of everything except the top ten books, records, movies, ideas. People worry about losing species diversity in the rain forest. But what about intellectual diversity - our most necessary resource? That's disappearing faster than trees. But we haven't figured that out, so now we're planning to put five billion people together in cyberspace. And it'll freeze the entire species. Everything will stop dead in its tracks. Everyone will think the same thing at the same time. Global uniformity"
This seems like it would be a dream come true for a totalitarian regime or modern aristocracy thriving on the control of its subjects.
There are other evolutionary traits to consider: bigger groups of animals do not necessarily correlate with better communication, hence economic/evolutionary friction (loss of efficiency). We're in a different situation where no one moved but everyone got connected, maybe this will let adaptation (good evolutionary traits and genes) spread faster across the species, or boost their completeness faster in time. Who knows. It's impossible to predict evolution at this stage, especially ours.
These warnings should be considered and taken into account, but not impede our drive to improve.
On a deeper political note, I and it seems more and more people seem to envision the idea of a much more granular organization and tiered, i.e. instead of 250 countries with average 30 million people, allow for much more diversity at a 1-10 million scale, and form meta blocks of ~1 billion to manage world affairs more easily.
With a 'true' bottom-up democracy, this would allow much diversity at a local scale (geographically, but we can already imagine some of these few million-people groups being almost entirely online).
That's 1 possible and desirable scenario for political evolution in this century IMHO (15 years of research in that domain lead me to this conclusion; there are other likely scenarios obviously).
The monoculture is practically dead.
Fringe media is rampant.
Microinfluencers abound.
Filter bubbles are omnipresent.
The long tail has exploded thanks to global supply chains and the TFE.
> No self-awareness, no reflection, no ability to consider the broad impact of their behaviour.
And as much as Zuckerberg is bad, I have to say, that this is true for many more people than just people, who are CEOs. I have the feeling, that this applies to the majority of the population by now. In combination with Facebook for these people it means, that whatever gets likes must be a good thing, as determined by "the community", no matter what the actual impact may be.
It is even sadder, that we already had philosophical works, which usually people learn in school about, but don't seem to actually understand, that they should think about them and perhaps apply them or parts of them to how they live. They just don't care and choose to remain ignorant. What about the categorical imperative of Kant? If you live in Germany you ought to know about it! How often do people ask themselves, if what they are doing is the right thing to do these days, using tools like the categorical imperative or any other philosophical theory, that someone from the past has put years into coming up with?
I am not saying "take this theory and apply 100% of it to your life". But people should think about their actions from time to time. Is Zuckerberg even aware, that his company had to pay the highest amount of cash _ever_ for privacy violations?!
Maybe they can’t articulate it because they legitimately are disconnected from from the company they founded?
How can anyone take this person seriously when they seem completely oblivious to the growing movement against free speech?
I'll back anyone promoting free speech in this regressive environment we find ourselves in, where a plethora of people are arguing to go back to the pre-20th century understanding of the first amendment where the rich and powerful could crush speech they didn't like.
This is what makes this discussion so frustrating. Avoiding discussion from the principles.
There is the obvious common carrier vs. publication angle. Being common carrier brings regulation, being publication brings legal liability. Facebook want's neither, so the only option is to obfuscate.
As such it's hard to come away with the impression that Zuckerberg himself fails to understand these things, which is the primary claim here, or if this is simply a thorny and complicated issue that doesn't allow for easy straightforward answers.
It's not easy for a person like Zuck to talk to normals, because he's not normal and he has data most people don't have access to. Working inside an internet company that deals with billions of users, you start to see/learn things about how people behave on the internet, you see state-sponsored actors trying to influence elections, etc, and you see it without hte spin and bias of the media.
I'm not defending zuck other than to say that at least he's articulated a position that defines the base philosophy of his platform.
'Mark Zuckerberg is a layperson on the subject of free speech'
You don't see the problem with that statement?
He's the major head of one of the largest communications networks on the planet. His opinion is one of the most important to sway for those of us that have any opinion, for OR against, freedom of speech.
His ignorance on the topic is pretty unforgivable, given the intrinsic nature of the business he runs and moderates.
Personally I tend to think that it's political double-talk rather than ignorance. He's just trying to space his answers away from any 'hard' questions so as to maintain a more vague (and politically enticing) persona.
Facebook has to implement these policies across 150 different countries while some professor on media can write a snarky article with no substance and make the brilliant observation that some people aren't honest about their online persona and use it to trick people.
(Similarly for water/waters.)
I'm not familiar with a general usage describing species of drivel in singular terms, however.
> Facebook’s content regulations have been incoherent in design and in practice
> Zuckerberg’s unsophisticated thoughts on free speech generated a manifesto that can only be called incoherent
> ... listen to billionaire who seems to have barely cracked a book on the subject and can’t seem to form a clear line of argument
> weak undergraduate essay that would earn at most a B- from any university professor
> shallowest of platitudes
> so weak and poorly structured that it could not have served as worse evidence in an argument for the value of speech itself