Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

This is called the Banality of Evil. Look up Hannah Arendt. It is a well established idea.

That’s sort of how things are where I work. The systems are so complicated and the interactions are often algorithmic and machine learning based. We try to maintain documentation and architecture artifacts with as much accuracy as possible. But in some cases things may as well be magic because no one really understands the whole process.

I don't think it's an emergent property, I think it's a by-product of the constraints. It's all well and good that they want to make Facebook safe and healthy, and I honestly believe plenty of people working there are trying to do just that. However, they are operating under the constraint that they cannot move backwards on profits, and therefore engagement.

Imagine if you were trying to fix climate change, but under the condition that you weren't allowed to burn fewer fossil fuels. You may try very hard, and very sincerely, but it's fool's errand.

Don't you think it's more likely that he's just using these projects to garner some goodwill and sympathy?

It's systems-level thinking applied to people. Reader beware though, once you start down this path, you can become adept at spotting this pattern emerge in many other human systems.

> I personally know and have previously worked with some of the people who work on trust and safety, specifically for kids. Good people who have kids of their own and who care about protecting people, especially children.

Those same people are protecting their children with $300k+ salaries and buying property in area where they can send their children to Gunn HS. While I empathize with these people the direct opportunity to protect your kin should not be understated. Do they mean well? Sure. Are they putting their best effort to fix things? Sure.

Here's the most important part:

Do you they know deep down inside that the only way to fix these things is to hurt Facebook financially? Probably. But they also know this means risking to protect their own children as a result (forced to move, lose job, less pay, etc.). What would you do? (I think I know the answer)

This can't be understated any further - in the end it doesn't matter what individual people at FB think because no one person or group of people has any legal, economical, or logistical ability to control the company except Mark Zuckerberg. He is figuratively and literally impossible to fight. Well, unless everyone deleted their accounts.

This is exactly the point Frances Haugen is making, and it's why this is so different and so much more significant than the other Facebook scandals and leaks in the past.

Haugen repeated over and over again her testimony today that Facebook is full of smart, thoughtful, kind, well-intentioned people, and that she has great empathy for them, even Mark Zuckerberg. Her point is that they have created a system of incentives that are inexorably leading to harmful outcomes. It is not about good and evil people, it is about the incentives. It's exactly as you are saying.

That's why she is not advocating to punish Facebook for being evil, but rather to force Facebook to reveal and permit research so we can understand the system and fix it, because Facebook is too deeply trapped in its own tangle of incentives to fix itself. In this I think she is absolutely correct.

It’s like saying that the people working in the slaughter houses are actually kind folk who do like animals and care deeply for their well being. That can be absolutely true, but they still work for a slaughter house. Your care and trust doesn’t matter a bit because the fundamental nature of the organization is that it profits from cruelty. I understand it pays well, and that maybe they are trying to be nice and all, but yeah there’s only so much purity of heart you can insist while still working for the slaughter house that is Facebook.

Good people have gone to work at facebook (and google) on jobs like privacy engineering and really try to do good work.

however, no matter how capable and ethically sound they are, the incentives are forever misaligned with the profit models for both, and adtech over all, as it currently stands. truly good people can chase money and hope to do good things in the process. it's as easy as this.

the writing was on the wall when alex stamos, by all measures the best example of the type of person you're referring to and FB's chief security officer... left. started in 2015 and was out of there by 2018. not many c-levels walk away from a job like that for the reasons he did, and when they do that should be the even to pay attention to (looking at you, sheryl "lean in" sandberg). this was the marker event if people were looking.

The person who mentions the banality of evil, dannykwells, has an excellent point.

But there's more at play here. I briefly worked on Twitter's anti-abuse engineering. Many of the people on that team cared a lot about protecting people. I sure did. But we didn't have the necessary power to actually solve the problem.

The people who did have that power were senior execs. They might say that they cared. In their heart of hearts, perhaps they even did. But their behavior demonstrated that they cared about other things much more.

My boss's boss, for example, was an engineering leader who had a climber's resume: quickly advancing through positions of more and more power. In my view, he cared about that a great deal, and did not give a shit about the actual harm to users. As soon as he got the chance, he pushed out my boss, laid off the team's managers, me included, and scattered the people to the wind.

I presume the same was true about the senior execs. They were aware Twitter was causing harm to people. If they wanted to know the details, we had plenty of research and they could have ordered more. Did they care? Impossible to know. But what they focused on was growth and revenue. Abuse was a big deal internally only as long as it was a big deal in the press.

FB seems guilty, only because their internal findings were leaked.

I have no empathy for them. They bring out the worst in Humanity. They build walled silos of festering hate and anger, all driven by "user engagement", "hours on site" and money.

> So maybe Zuck is telling the truth here, that they are trying to fix all this.

Maybe they are trying, but also maybe they are trying to have their cake and eat it too.

What I mean is that very likely the proper way to fix things would financially hurt FB, which seems it’s something they really don’t want to do.

> So maybe Zuck is telling the truth here, that they are trying to fix all this.

Except they are just playing around with the outrage algorithms, the problem is created by Facebook, not some natural occurence. If they wanted to "fix" anything they would make their algorithmic timelines opt-in, or at least an option, for starters.

It is of course very much in the interest of the people working at Facebook to make this seem like a problem that is just there and that it is some "difficult to solve", that "moderation doesn't scale" etc.. These are deflections to make everyone ignore that Facebooks tampering is where it starts.

I've been framing this whole thing as a universal property of human society and it seems to fit pretty well for me.

Outrage attracts attention in all group interactions. I can't think of a single large scale group forum where this isn't true. It's integral to an absurd degree in our news cycle. Howard Stern exploited this property in his rise to fame. It's a core element in state propaganda, well documented throughout human history.

I'm old enough to remember when the internet was a lot more free - when there generally wasn't some parent corporation imposing content censorship on what you put on your homepage, or what you said on IRC. All of the complaints regarding Facebook were true of internet communications back then too (on the "sex trafficking" issue, compare to Craigslist of yore!)

The big difference seems to be there's an entity we can point a finger at now. Communications on Facebook aren't worse than what was on the internet two decades ago. In fact, they're far, far more clean and controlled.

What I look to is whether Facebook is more objectionable than alternative forms of communication, and I can't find any reason to believe that this is the case. Is twitter better? Is reddit? Is usenet? No.

So why does Facebook draw such ire?

Are people calling for controls on Facebook also calling for controls on self-published websites? On open communication systems like IRC or email? Where is the coherent moral philosophy regarding internet speech?

To be honest, my biggest concern when I read the news surrounding this issue is that most of the internet might not be old enough to remember what it means to have a truly free platform, unencumbered by moralizing. Why are people begging for more controls?

All I can suggest is look at the actual data and not the reporting on the data.

Not all evil looks that way to outside observers, unfortunately. I believe that the assumptions of FB that allowed it to get so big, "optimize engagement above all else", built a system that in many ways is at odds with the values of our society when everyone is a user.

Internally at FB, everything looks good, you hit all your OKRs and believe users are better off. Maybe you don't, but you're bonus is huge so you'll put your head down and keep on. Externally, it's an entirely different picture. Connecting people is a comically small issue society needs FB to solve, relative to our need for them not to harm children, or promote extremism, or hide research when testifying to congress.

> So maybe Zuck is telling the truth here, that they are trying to fix all this. But no one can see the forest from the trees.

Ah, this is what I think of as Schrodinger's Accountability. Zuckerberg and Facebook's senior execs are simultaneously: A) so brilliant for running Facebook that they deserve to be incredibly rich, and B) so normal that they can't possibly be expected to understand the consequences of their actions, and so are morally blameless. Heads they win, tails we lose.

I say it's one or the other. If Facebook is too big to be understood, it should be broken up into small enough units that mere mortals can see the forest and tend it responsibly. And if not, the execs should be morally and legally culpable for the harm it does.

So if it a form of a modified Hanlon's razor, "never attribute to malice what can be explained by lack of capability" particularly because they are too big, it sounds like the answer is to break them up so they aren't too big. Is that the solution?

Zuckerberg is making an almost entirely emotional appeal in his statement. Most of his claims are not backed up / buttressed with facts, numbers, and specifics. The statement is designed to make a reader feel bad for Facebook as if Facebook was a friend, and not a corporation with billions of dollars in quarterly profits.

Though the statement seems well-meaning, etc., it is weaselly and manipulative. It also conveniently doesn't address some of deeper issues from Frances Haugen's testimony.

For example, Haugen focused on the fact that Zuckerberg has created a relatively flat organization, where if decisions help the core metric they must be good, and vice versa. Haugen testified that Zuckerberg was made aware that instituting a newsfeed tweak would entail a) small ding to the core engagement metrics and b) would decrease violence in Ethiopia... He chose the metric over the decreased violence.

There comes a point where blindly pursuing metrics -- be it money or engagement -- without regard to the effects on society are hard if not impossible to distinguish from sociopathic behavior.

Also, let's not forget that researchers and renown statisticians employed by / sponsored by Big Tobacco (e.g. R.A. Fisher) convinced themselves that smoking didn't cause cancer. [0]

[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2000852/

Seems like you more than anyone would see that solving the types of problems FB is trying to solve eg: freedom of speech vs user safety / harm reduction is not some super simple problem, no? I wouldn't call Reddit evil despite the fact that many powermods are both amazing contributors doing free labor and curating great communities while also simultaneously abusing their power every day to silence people they disagree with, shaping narratives in human culture, automating blanket unappealable bans on users for participating in unrelated subreddits (even if you were participating in that subreddit in order to combat its views), making snap judgments on content moderation that might ruin someone's day when they make a bad call on a ban or delete, or unilaterally self appointing themselves as mouthpieces for their broader communities via subreddit blackouts or preachy pinned posts.

It's unfortunate that when you build a product so close to the ground of human communication and human nature you're never going to be able to get everything right, and you're no longer solving technology problems alone but trying to basically combat basic human moral failing itself. We don't ask that of the telephone company.

^ That being said, we can only excuse some of their failures with the above line of thinking. Others we can blame on greed or recklessness, or ignoring the social costs of something like ML recommenders optimizing for engagement. Not sure if those things deserve to be called evil, but I'd still hold back personally. Misguided, overcome by greed, or reckless, perhaps.

The complexity of the system is too great. It’s similar to how the economy runs, there are many very intentioned, intelligent (event brilliant) people who study and focus on it. The problem is it is so complex that no one can fully understand all the components. Not to mention the amount of people in Facebook and in the economy who are intentional bad actors.

I’m not saying they are blameless I just always have a tough time laying all the blame on a couple people.

Shouldn't it then be possible to account for and correct for the emergent evil? That's the point of government regulation is it not? Maybe then an appropriate, self-critical response from Facebook would be, "Yeah, our system is broken. How can we help?" instead of immediately going on the defensive. If they claim to care about the bigger picture, they need to acknowledge it without excuses.

I mean, that's what it might be. This might be the "banality of evil", an emergent property of social networks themselves. If this is the case then we have a harder question ahead of us as an entire world: how do we fix the problems of pandora's box?

I can care about many things. Eating healthy, getting exercise, reading.

My actions can show otherwise. IE: im going to go eat a slice of cake, sit down and watch TV tonight.

My priorities and actions don't appear to be inline and the result I'm going for won't be met.

The disconnect is that Facebook is coming at this with the assumption that it is right and proper for Facebook to exist. The rest of us don’t make that assumption. So “how can Facebook best serve kids” might be “withdraw from routing tables permanently” but that isn’t on the whiteboard in Zuck’s office.

Its easy to reconcile.

Just remember Rationality is Bounded, ie there are problems chimps with 6 inch brains cant solve. Its the classic Jurassic Park story, where man says he can control anything. And then realizes he cant. By which time its too late.

This is why the road to hell is paved by "good people who have kids" with their good intentions.

FBs issues did not appear yday.

Like the endless war the issues where there right from the start. So why are we talking about it today? Cuz lots of good people didnt do anything, not because they arent good or skilled, because the problem is too complex for them.

This is where Bounded Rationality helps resolve issues. If the problem is too complex, pick a simpler problem.

This is hard for some chimps to do for various reason. So entertaining them is a recipe for disaster. Their narrative will always be- "people are good. People experienced World War 1. They know whats at stake. They lost family, friends, body parts. Many are great Heroes. Trust them. They know what they are doing". And still we got World War 2.

Why? Cause rationality, skill and experince doesnt matter for some problems. All the "good germans" from politicians, to religious leaders, to military and intelligence leaders knew Hitler had to go long before any notion of war entered the minds. Every coup and assassination they ploted they second guessed themselves. All of them ended up dead.

> The best I can come up with is that Facebook is so big that the "evil" is an emergent property of all the different things that are happening

> so while the individuals involved have good intentions with what they are working on, the sum total of all employees' intentions ends up broken.

I think, honestly, that a huge thing is that when you put together basically the entirety of the internet, and society into a giant conversational feedback loop you're bound to spin out the worst, especially if FB wasn't 100% of the time trying to filter it (which they weren't because its a business and the problems weren't always equally known).

What I hear from Zuckerberg over and over is "we're good people and working on it, look at A and B things we're doing" with an implication that that's good enough, so what's everybody up in arms about? That's the core of his tone-deafness to me. If Zuckerberg is fully honest, it means he basically just doesn't have a grip on reality and he isn't fit to lead a corporation this big and impactful. And I tend to believe that, because he's ultimately just a college kid with a laptop who ended up in some circumstances that snowballed.

As other have said, my experience with Facebook just doesn't mirror the "angryness" and hatred that other people are seeing. My Facebook stream is just every day things from friends I have made through the world. It is very useful for me to maintain a bit of a touch with people I esteem so much but with whom I've list touch through the years.

The "angry facebook" experience to me seems like the moms against heavy metal / twisted sister case: People are seeing a reflection of what their peers share.

If their circles are angry and share disinformation, that's what they will see.

"The best I can come up with is that Facebook is so big that the "evil" is an emergent property of all the different things that are happening."

I half agree. I do in fact think its ben baked in from the get go, just that there was a period where it was not an obvious pillar; you could in fct do all kinds of essentially innocuous things and accept some surveillance capitalism with awareness of your wn liabilities.

It's now become so much larger and problematic, that the 'emergent property' is that every move adds weight to the need for the firms dismemberment into smaller units, or punishing regulatory limits. And I mean truly brutally, snap-noise making bone-breaking regulations.

"So maybe Zuck is telling the truth here, that they are trying to fix all this."

Nope. He knows if he wants to stay on top, he had t keep doing mpre of what hes done, and that his choices are otherwise to actually adapt, which he will not do.

I don’t think the existence of good people or what any one’s intentions are matter at all. I doubt anyone can change the course or Facebook. The stock price runs the show.

Couldn't it be possible that the people you know try hard but are limited with what they can do because of policy and decisions that come from above? Stuff like hiding research that looks bad isn't something that a dev or even a manager decides.

The human element is not a variable we define in code. There are things that, by the nature of how they're used, become harmful. Intent does not matter. Good people can intend that their new free anonymous file sharing service will be amazing. Until it's used by bad actors. The concept is good, the intent is good, but in practice it doesn't work that way.

There's also another concept, the reality that people do not actually care as much as we think they do. There's a program every public school in the U.S. has where kids run at each other, at speed, knock each other to the ground with concussions, tear their muscles, break their bones, and have terrible behaviors towards one another. Yet every school still has said program. Parents encourage their kids to join. We just don't care about whats right.

Sometimes it is not the virtue of people in the organization, it is a function of the structure and incentives of the organization, the "emergent property" that you reference.

Imagine if a company had invented methamphetamine, but the ill effects weren't as readily apparent. Then they built an empire on the belief that the societal benefits of millions of people running around in a seemingly ultra-productive manic state were a godsend to society, and that they had truly changed the world. Then realize that the effects of Facebook are worse than that--it has the opposite effect on productivity, has maybe worse mental health effects, and is nevertheless highly addictive. The reality would never sink in inside that bubble. Worse, the tens of thousands of people whose jobs and wealth depending on tuning said meth to be as addictive as possible are...what? Pawns? Believers? Accomplices? Delusional? Regular people. They are regular people.

It's ridiculous to think a platform that most of humanity uses can be controlled to the liking of the left, the right, the upside down and etc ... cause all those groups make up humanity and we all do not nor will ever think exactly the same and we all have different motives and biases.

Misinformation that's been around forever... ever play the telephone game in school .. you tell one person a story they tell the next and the next and the next soon that story is no longer factual. Stir all that in with bias and things get even murkier!

There is only one way to fix this, prevent anyone from influencing what is shown more prominently to users. The simplest solution for that would be simply chronological order only from your friends.

Another "statement", one not intended for the public

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/growth-at-any-c...

(Note: "Connecting people" here does not mean providing communications services, it means using behind-the-scenes, unconsented, and sometimes deceptive tactics to figure out whether and how people are connected to each other IRL.)

Andrew Bosworth June 18, 2016

The Ugly

We talk about the good and the bad of our work often. I want to talk about the ugly.

We connect people.

That can be good if they make it positive. Maybe someone finds love. Maybe it even saves the life of someone on the brink of suicide.

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 coordinated 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 isn't something we are doing for ourselves. Or for our stock price (ha!). It is literally just what we do. We connect people. Period.

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.

The natural state of the world is not connected. It is not unified. It is fragmented by borders, languages, and increasingly by different products. The best products don't win. The ones everyone use win.

I know a lot of people don't want to hear this. Most of us have the luxury of working in the warm glow of building products consumers love. But make no mistake, growth tactics are how we got here. If you joined the company because it is doing great work, that's why we get to do that great work. We do have great products but we still wouldn't be half our size without pushing the envelope on growth. Nothing makes Facebook as valuable as having your friends on it, and no product decisions have gotten as many friends on as the ones made in growth. Not photo tagging. Not news feed. Not messenger. Nothing.

In almost all of our work, we have to answer hard questions about what we believe. We have to justify the metrics and make sure they aren't losing out on a bigger picture. But connecting people. That's our imperative. Because that's what we do. We connect people.

I have a friend who started work there in the last three years.

It’s so big and so organized, they can come up with an idea for a new service or policy they want to implement and it takes roughly two weeks to get all the channels to approve and move forward on the idea. Implementation is different, this is just getting all the approvals from legal, finance, marketing, etc..

They are definitely in a position to make changes quickly should they need to.

I worked at FB and struggle with exactly this.

Good people work for oil companies and car companies.

> So maybe Zuck is telling the truth here, that they are trying to fix all this. But no one can see the forrest from the trees.

Don't fall for words!

Frances Haugen was able to see the big picture. The documents she presented had Facebook employees mentioning it. Facebook didn't act on what was known. It is not that it wasn't known.

To paraphrase John Roberts - the only way not to do a thing is not to do that thing.

The statement that made it really clear to me was facebook has moderators for 50 languages... while supporting 111 different languages [1]. It's wildly irresponsible to offer services in a language you can't moderate in.

And it's sure seems an intentional part of their fig leaf denial strategy -- viz the recent revelations about human trafficking on fb in arabic [2]. Or armed groups in Ethiopia inciting violence on FB in ways that fb chooses not to monitor because of language issues [2].

A company with 21Q2 revenues of $28.5B can't hire moderators in languages spoken in countries with low costs of living... It reflects a thirst for growth with no thought given to the people affected by their growth.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-languages-insigh...

[2] https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-drug-cartels-human-tra...

They're in a tough spot by design. Much of Facebook is private. How can they possibly be transparent enough to satisfy critics about what actions they take? Share too much and another Cambridge Analytica situation pops up. Share too little and researchers decry coverup over lack of access.

There is a German saying: "Der Fisch stinkt von Kopf her". 90% of all employees may very well have the best intentions, but this doesn't mean anything if the decision makers have not.

A company is not a democracy.

Indeed, we have probably just seen one of the (former) employees with good intentions struggle to stay true to them.

Its been said that this psychopathic behaviour is an emergent property of many corporations and emerges due to the nature of their very legal structure. In other word, the people may be fine but the outcomes can turn out not to be. See...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Corporation_%282003_film%2...

"The Corporation attempts to compare the way corporations are systematically compelled to behave with what it claims are the DSM-IV's symptoms of psychopathy, e.g., the callous disregard for the feelings of other people, the incapacity to maintain human relationships, the reckless disregard for the safety of others, the deceitfulness (continual lying to deceive for profit), the incapacity to experience guilt, and the failure to conform to social norms and respect the law"

> So maybe Zuck is telling the truth here, that they are trying to fix all this. But no one can see the forrest from the trees

yea, maybe.. they _are_ cashing in billions in the meanwhile

i want to downvote you so badly

I'm reminded of Terry Pratchett's image of the row of mugs (with cute little sayings) owned by the torturers of Omnia's Quisition.

This is a generally hard problem but it's as significant now as it was in the aftermath of WWII. I'd say it speaks to the reality of human subjectivity, and it never goes away: I can only wonder if the same will be true of AI, and whether it's possible for a thinking being to really internalize the concept of hard limits to their perception, and build that into their model of the world.

You could say the God concept is a way of trying to internalize the limits to perception: 'something is vastly significant and it's not me, and my understanding does not and cannot encompass it'.

With OR without this concept we as humans are exactly as evil as each other. That's the secret. There isn't a qualitative difference between 'us' and history's great monsters. It's about the choices we've made and how we've acted on them: the rest is rationalization, which we are all subject to in one way or another.

Grappling with this is the Nuremberg moment: the question is 'never mind whether you feel you've been good, what have you done?'

So, what have they done?

It’s easy for me to reconcile after living through COVID. There are people in my own family who have emotionally told me they’d never do anything to hurt their family. Meanwhile throughout the pandemic they have purposefully hidden when they have been sick and spent full days with their elderly family and immune compromised 3 year old, touching food and participating in cooking. There is a big difference between emotional and cognitive empathy.

I also think the people who make the biggest show of how much they care tend to be the same who don’t actually act in a caring way at all.

No, I’m not surprised at all that FB employees say they really care. And that they do so very convincingly.

The problem with facebook is that it plays with fire every day. Kills innocent people every day. But they have a fire department, so they can't be all bad right?

If you can't do what you do in a way that isn't this harmful to the world, then you always have the choice to just stop it.

These are all smart people. They could be working on anything else and be successful at it. But they are scared of change. The money is too good.

I just wish the people working at facebook that are decent, that they would just leave and go work somewhere else.

And that we stop debating whether Zuckerberg is redeemable. He is not. He is a psycho. He is why it escalates this much. He is a monster. Beyond all the lies, he intends the damage he does to the world. Maybe someone bullied him as a child. Maybe he is just not well. I don't know.

Perhaps we should help Zuck a little, and ban advertising in any social media application. That should at least set the incentives straight.

If a company desired to be able to sow doubt if its impacts on society ever came under a microscope... one gambit (and an effective one, based on your reaction) would be to hire people who genuinely and passionately research and work on trust and safety, then systematically under-resource their teams and gaslight them into thinking there are fundamental reasons their recommendations must be ignored.

For instance, contrast Zuckerberg's statement here:

> And if social media were as responsible for polarizing society as some people claim, then why are we seeing polarization increase in the US while it stays flat or declines in many countries with just as heavy use of social media around the world?

With such severe under-resourcing and deprioritization that one person had the literal weight of worldwide election integrity on her shoulders, as revealed more than a year ago: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/facebook...

> The memo is a damning account of Facebook’s failures. It’s the story of Facebook abdicating responsibility for malign activities on its platform that could affect the political fate of nations outside the United States or Western Europe. It's also the story of a junior employee wielding extraordinary moderation powers that affected millions of people without any real institutional support, and the personal torment that followed.

Haugen echoes the same in https://archive.is/tQwE9 :

> She soon grew skeptical that her team could make an impact, she said. Her team had few resources, she said, and she felt the company put growth and user engagement ahead of what it knew through its own research about its platforms’ ill effects.

The fact of the matter is that if Zuckerberg were to say "I'm going to pour our profits into trust and safety and abuse avoidance in order to ensure that our position as a trusted brand is sustainable for generations to come," his high levels of voting control and clear defense to any allegations that this was against long-term shareholder interest would fully make that possible. The fact that quite the opposite has happened should be considered with much more weight than his words in a reactive press statement.

So, anecdotally, the most amoral programmers that I've ever worked with have ended up at Facebook. I'm sure there are decent people there, but I couldn't personally work there in good conscience.

> But no one can see the forrest from the trees.

Who are the people to be bold enough to speak for "everyone". You are definitely not speaking for me. I personally get a lot of value from facebook. I never had any problem with it in any respect. Use it to communicate with my family around the world. Used it to rent my apartment, sell thing on marketplace. I keep in touch with people I know. And have very thoughtful and enlightening political discussions that help me do the right choice who to vote for and stay informed. (The only other place with better discussions is hacker news thought)

Facebook just needs to look at itself from a complex interacting systems point of view.

It is the structural incentives in the system that cause the problems.

So yes, evil and discrimination can be an emergent problem even though no individual intends harm.

Then you might also have bad actors who exploit those structural incentives/weaknesses.

Aaron Swartz wrote a great book review of Moral Mazes[1] which touches on this.

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/bizethics

> I'm sick of billionaires with megaphones blaring their virtues

As a society, the US has shifted its values from intellectually sound principles, to what ever rich people shout out.

I vomit in my mouth when I see videos of people showing currency, of people talking to you about "doing the hustle", etc etc.

US has fallen into an abyss of moral decline, where the value of your words are directly proportional to the amount of wealth you have managed to gather, no matter the means.

So agree. Comes off as super cringe. Silicon Valley has lost amy moral high ground from the early days and should act like any other corporate... "its not illegal and it would lose us money to change, why would we change it?" That would be honest, logical and frankly refreshing

> Your entire model of the world is broken, Mark. No wonder nothing makes sense.

+100

This has been the consistent picture of Mark from the very beginning of Facebook. ‘Stupid fs gave me their info’

As titzer said, the actions speak louder than the words and Mark’s actions over the years have never varied from their hyper focus.

If you kept reading you would see the points he makes where he outlines exactly where their actions match up with their intentions.

I believe Zuck became billionaire for creating value for people.

For creating something from nothing. So if he has 100 billion, it's just a tiny fraction of the value the society got from him in return. I wish there were more people like Zuck, Elon musk etc.. these are the people that advance society.

I read so much hatred towards rich people here instead of praising them, it somehow gives me the chills to know there so many people around me that are full of baseless hatred to the point that they are "sick".

>The real explanation must lie in other aspects of US culture, or the US political system

First-past-the-post voting leads to a two party system which leads to more polarization. If you have multiple political parties, polarization can only go so far because there will be centrist groups working against polarization. In the US, there is no force pushing for centrism.

That is because most other countries have multi party systems.

The polarization is still there, but spread thin amongst various factions.

In the US, people are shoehorned into R or D.

Edit : I would also like to point out that the OP is a bit confused between cause and effect. In the US, the effect is deep polarization. However, the cause is the power of mass communication, especially misinformation and blatant lies, that FB enables and does not bother to control. The cause is common to all the countries in the world, the effect varies due to various other factors, one of them being the presence of a multi-party system.

Take the example of India. FB has a large and active user base. However, India being a chaos of various identities, cultures, regions, languages, etc, divisions in society are less pronounced as there are a large number of players (politically, regionally, locally, etc)

Other than that, the effect of FB in Europe is also less visible due to the same reason. Every EU country has mostly multi party systems, leading to spreading thin of the hate and focus.

Not sure if I fully agree with that argument. With the US being a superpower, the stakes are high and this invites unique foreign influence via social media. That foreign influence could be state coordinated or just come from regular people who have an emotional stake in US politics. I've seen it myself, outside of the US people are more concerned about US politics than their own and engage with it on social media which only adds to the pile of insanity. Also, because of limited bandwidth, only a small handful of topics tend to monopolize, and as such they are usually US topics.

I'd argue that Brexit might not have gotten the same amount of traction and neither the Catalan Independence Movement

The political climate in the UK is pretty savage right now, Brexit pretty much split the country in two. I don’t think this is just a US phenomenon, especially given a lot of what happens in US politics bleeds into the rest of the world (which is why a lot of us follow it so closely).

Is it true that polarization has not increased in other countries? Is there published data on it? Would be interesting to see which countries are experiencing historically high levels of polarization.

How would you categorize FB/whatsapp-driven genocide in Myanmar[0], polarization(+) or polarization-lite?

The semantic acrobatics in statements like this drive the discussion into pedantic details that successfully lose sight that on net, this is a cancerous product, with a pathology unique to each culture it touches.

like, there's been leaked FB PM discussions on this very topic and phrasing it like a product challenge versus the moral calamity that it is.

[0]https://gizmodo.com/facebook-still-working-on-the-whole-geno... [0.5] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo...

It’s interesting that you don’t even agree with the fact that Zuckerberg claims. That polarization is declining or flat outside the US. Your claims that it’s less than in the US, but still increasing outside the US is a lot more aligned with reality.

But the fact is that this isn’t the defense Zuckerberg thinks it is. In fact, it may even suggest the absolute opposite.

Facebook has never been as popular outside the US as it has within it. The best indication of this fact is FB’s $19Bn purchase of WhatsApp which was largely driven by the fact that FB Messenger was basically only popular within the US, with the rest of the world preferring WhatsApp, which was also an indication of how FB’s network was simply not as entrenched outside the US as it was within it.

This is a good observation, but I don't think it absolves social media. There are likely many factors increasing polarization, and social media may amplify those factors and/or turn otherwise harmless factors into harmful ones.

The core idea behind social media is that it amplifies various voices, instead of those few who's job it is to participate in the media. In the US, this has effectively turned our right to freedom of speech into a right of freedom to broadcast.

The total size, wealth, and political influence of the US are much larger than the most culturally comparable nations. The value for those within and without the nation to spend effort using social media to influence discourse and election results is high, and is likely at least a partial factor.

One possible explanation is that Facebook in US is subject to more adversarial actors than other countries.

A propagandist-for-hire choosing to astroturf, conduct false flag campaigns, form vote brigades, etc. is more likely to target the US political market because -- globally speaking -- there's more political power at stake.

Whether FB can claim that as an excuse is another question.

US is a weak democracy, simple as that.

murdoch

The fact that people such as Peter Turchin predicted a peak in US political polarization starting in around 2020 (a prediction made in a published paper in an academic journal in 2010) shows that surely FB is not the immediate cause. But that's kind of like how gasoline doesn't start fires. It doesn't, but it accelerates them, and makes the consequences worse.

According to one researcher (https://www.brown.edu/news/2020-01-21/polarization) polarization is increasing as parties become more closely aligned to ideologies (eg. religion, race). Looking across the aisle, your opponents looks more different then they did a decade ago.

Why? My theory is that data mining and software is identifying and targeting seams of ideology that are most readily influenced, so in effect campaigning efforts are efficiently widening the divide between parties. Social media just happens to be the choice source of this data, as well as the medium to influence.

It's the US legacy media that is the main reason for the polarisation - the two party system is a factor, but the regular media is the one pitting "us vs. them" in every single minute of every broadcast.

Social media has downsides, but to lay the blame firmly at the feet of Facebook is to willfully ignore the culpability of CNN, Fox, the NYTimes, Washington Post, and many other legacy media outlets that are making tons of money otherizing the part of the country that is not their readership.

Or it could be the enemies of democracy can leverage social media for division and the enemies of authoritarianism can’t. And some countries don’t have as big of targets on their backs as the US.

This will sound dramatic, but could it be because the US is the most important market for both advertising and political disinformation?

Regarding advertising, for companies like Facebook, they may have billions of DAU but still derive the majority of their revenue from rich countries like the US. In 2020 the US and Canada were 45% of Facebook's revenue according to this random website I found: https://statstic.com/facebook-revenue-by-geography/ That's way more than the other regions in terms of $/user, so Facebook is a lot more incentivized to over-optimize for engagement based on US users. Depending on how much the algorithmic feed changes from country to country, it's possible that other countries experience less polarization simply because their culture is weighted less in training the feed's engagement optimization algorithms.

Regarding disinformation and political destablization, most countries simply aren't relevant enough on the world stage to be worth investing money in targetting in this area. The US, China, Russia, UK, Germany, France, Japan, India are all probably relevant enough. China and Russia effectively don't use facebook and are the most obvious non-US-aligned bad actors. They would also get way more bang-for-their-buck targeting the US than other countries. Note, I don't think is as widespread of a problem as many people think it is, but I bring it up because it's relevant in the context of political polarisation since there is strong evidence that it has occurred at least in the 2016 election: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/oct/30/facebook-....

Actually, the two combined can be scary. If you can use outrage (great for engagement) to drive engagement in your content which is designed to politically destabilize the US, you can get a huge reach. This is effectively what you see a lot of the time in highly-engaged US content on facebook anyway: politically inclined outrage.

You don't need to go anywhere else to find polarization. Right here on HN, conservative points are downvoted, flagged and shunned despite of having excellent credibility, just a different perspective of core values. This was not the case, note the number of downvoted comments in this highly debated topic in 2016, they were very few: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12926678

It's one of those things that says a lot about the people on HN and their tolerance to wide range of opinions. And yes, we all agree that rude, disrespectful and violence has no place on HN. But, disagreeing on Tax policies? Property laws? Patents? Let people talk about it.

I really don't see it different than anti-liberal hostility on conservative forums. It's the same. Exactly the same.

Let's change this and exercise some restraint. Most people on either fence have good faith.

Given the late 1800s and early 1900s US were also very polarized, part of me wonders if the post-Cold-War world is returning to some sort of polarized state. It can feel like there are a lot of different perspectives on the way things should be, and thus there's less certainty where to go.

That said, I'm not a historian so take my shower thoughts with a teaspoon of salt.

The premise of this argument is false. In Germany, where I live, polarization has increased dramatically, especially since COVID. I don't know about Facebook, but the tone on Twitter is harsh, the hate is palpable. The difference is maybe that unlike in the States it's not a 50:50 split, but maybe 80:20.

What gives you the impression that countries besides the US are not becoming more polarized? My experience in Europe and South America make me think it's getting worse everywhere.

Obviously it depends on the actors on social media what level on harm social media can cause. If there weren't political forces, foreign governments and troll media such as Fox and friends then social media could be much less harmful.

It requires considerable expertise and resources to spin up a disinformation campaigns continuously. The US leads here because of the size of its market and determination of its adversaries.

Mark tries to spin the responsibility away in the quoted sentence.

That's worded to tip toe around the truth which is that in other countries FB is increasing polarization, that FB knew about it, and tried to ignore it - from the third^ file:

>In Poland, the changes made political debate on the platform nastier, Polish political parties told the company, according to the documents. The documents don’t specify which parties.

>“One party’s social media management team estimates that they have shifted the proportion of their posts from 50/50 positive/negative to 80% negative, explicitly as a function of the change to the algorithm,” wrote two Facebook researchers in an April 2019 internal report.

>Nina Jankowicz, who studies social media and democracy in Central and Eastern Europe as a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, said she has heard complaints from many political parties in that region that the algorithm change made direct communication with their supporters through Facebook pages more difficult. They now have an incentive, she said, to create posts that rack up comments and shares—often by tapping into anger—to get exposure in users’ feeds. The Facebook researchers, wrote in their report that in Spain, political parties run sophisticated operations to make Facebook posts travel as far and fast as possible.

>“They have learnt that harsh attacks on their opponents net the highest engagement,” they wrote. “They claim that they ‘try not to,’ but ultimately ‘you use what works.’ ”

>In the 15 months following fall 2017 clashes in Spain over Catalan separatism, the percentage of insults and threats on public Facebook pages related to social and political debate in Spain increased by 43%, according to research conducted by Constella Intelligence, a digital risk protection firm. Facebook researchers wrote in their internal report that they heard similar complaints from parties in Taiwan and India.

^ https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-algorithm-change-zucke...

Add to that the revelations from yesterday's^^ hearing regarding FB's role in violence in Myanmar and Ethiopia plus repression in PRC and Iran and there is no other interpretation than Mr Zuckerberg is lying.

^^ https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/05/world/meanwhile-in-america-oc...

Because the rest of the world is behind the curve, the US is merely leading the charge as its established political landscape perfectly plays into the filter bubble polarization FB feeds on.

Something that's quite observable in places like Germany: Election campaigns in Germany used to be quite boring, there used to be no such thing as "political attack ads", parties kept their campaigning to topics they stand for, instead of trying to attack other parties or candidates on their particular positions.

At least that's how it used to be for the longest time, but during the last decade the whole tone around German elections became noticeably more hostile, something that directly correlates with the rise in popularity of the AfD.

Said AfD has hired American Harris Media for their campaign strategy, the same company that won Trump his presidency [0]. They not only introduced the wonders of micro-targeting, which already contributed to the Obama presidencies, but also added their American flavor of running political campaigns with these extremely hostile overtones.

The latest highlight of that escalation, during the recent election, has been far-right parties literally calling to "hang the Greens" [1]

Or to give another, often overlooked, example; The US wasn't the only country that saw their capitol stormed in recent times, an attempt was also made in Germany, but there police actually stood their ground [2]

And while most of the big established parties condemned what happened there, the rising far-right ones did nothing like that, they were right there riling people up.

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-29/the-germa...

[1] https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/german-court-orders-removal-of-...

[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53964147

I think that the point here is that all the controversy is because of a study from Facebook's own research. If a cigarette company came out with a study showing cigarettes were dangerous, perhaps it would be a different story.

Of course, I wouldn't say that being aware of the problems your product causes makes you less culpable; just the opposite.

Google handled this in the right way: fire researchers who are clearly pursuing anti-company agendas, always. It's worse to pretend to support research (or "research", which TBH is what most of the anti-AI shite at Google was, bad actors working with external groups to "take down" big tech, funnel docs to DSA, etc) that hurts you than it is to just stop pretending you care what a bunch of hard-left extremist assholes think.

Facebook has a tough problem, though, because a lot of their criticism is not just one wing of loonies, it's from every direction including normal sane people, and a lot of them agree with each other for once. I don't think they're breaking any laws, but I don't doubt someone will invent a shady case or charge them under a new law just because everyone hates Zuck. Not sure how you dodge that.

Same for Dupont having tons of their own research on the health hazards of Teflon, yet both ignored in the name of profits.

and money, don't forget that

I stopped reading about two seconds in, when it popped up some dumb thing trying to get me to log in / sign up.

Same sentiment after reading this. He is basically saying "we have industry leading research team so even if we don't make decisions align to their recommendations, we care deeply about their work?"

Yeah. The second paragraph honestly just made me dislike him and want to close my account.

Yup. I once saw an accountant write, "Don't tell me your priorities. Show me your budget and I'll tell you your priorities."

Facebook's whole history is not really caring about those things. What they care about is not looking bad. Which is why they trot out those lines when things get too awful for the public, the press, and legislators to ignore.

Yep. Honestly when I read that sentence I turned off.

This note is a rant against the whistle-blower, without even an empty apology.

I have NO doubt that if you asked Mark to push a button in which all the engagement were healthy, he'd do it after being assured the engagement amount wouldn't change.

He probably does care about safety, well-being and mental health" (though not about serial commas apparently). He cares about them in the same way that the vaping companies care about lung health (they exist to reduce cigarette smoking, right?)

I handled Mark's rambling post like many others similar to it, I reported it as 'false news - politics' (in this case^) and then sent a message to the author politely detailing why.

^ After niceties I started with a quote from his post which was false and the the explanation from reliable news sources of why it was 'false news - politics.'

Which points made you stop and think

They do a lot of good bringing people together, but it’s a double edged sword with massive potential for abuse. It’s not up for debate that Facebook causes harm. The only question is how much is too much? At what point do we step in, tell them their mitigations are ineffective, and break up or regulate their systems?

No, you're not the only one. There are other people who are ignorant of how bad Facebook is.

I’m with you. Facebook brings way more good to the world than bad. And the bad it brings is just amplification of what already exists. And with the Internet that amplification will happen with or without facebook.

Also the fact that much of the research / “leaks” are showing most of the issues are only happening in the US is a sort of a glaring hole in most of the arguments being made against FB. The US is just borked at the moment. Everything is red vs blue, and no one even cares what the issues are at this point.

Honestly, agreed..

Well to start, Facebook is neither good or nor bad - it is not a person and does not have morality. The human mind is not really capable of dealing with an abstract entity such as a corporation so we anthropomorphize the large mess of people, software, and hardware presenting us a little app on our phones as imbued with a personality and morality. Then we debate whether this mess, which has Zuch's vague face over it, is a personification of good or evil. It's neither - it is a morality-free phenomenon.

Facebook's properties have benefits for certain slices of the population in certain instances, and negative effects for other parts of the population. Businesses rely on Facebook's properties for communication, people rely on Messenger and especially WhatApp for communication, artists rely on Instagram for inspiration and social outreach, teens use the properties to connect with each other and to feel sad or happy about themselves in social contexts (as teens tend to anyway). In some cases the teen are happier, in others sadder.

I got to know my gf over Messenger, I have wasted tons of time on Facebook, Instagram has been a medium influence on me. Life happens, people happen, and now social media happens.

Zuckerberg is the public face of the organization now and it is his life's work. He has an entire society's worth of social media interactions he is tasked with controlling, censoring, and maintaining. People tell him they want it free for some speech, closed for other speech, they want Facebook to hire tons of people to censor and curate the content, they want great decisionmaking, they want to be be free to say anything they want to say (so long as it matches their specific moral values), they want their kids to only see good things online, they want their kids to find what they need but see only what they should see on all of Facebook's multifaceted properties. It is a huge task.

Why would Zuckerberg intentionally want to fail at this task and have people hate his company? To make more money? He is not an idiot and knows that the success of the company is dependent on its reputation. How exactly could he NOT do his utmost best to mitigate the negative effects of his properties, enhance the positive effects and thereby positively influence everyone - the users, the company, himself? I don't understand the cynicism which drives all these comments either

I get why people hate Facebook, but to me Facebook is no worse (or better) than what a top social network service would be, in this format (a timeline that you can post anything) at least.

If FB shuts down today there would be another one that is occupying the exactly same space, having the same influence on the society soon.

Different groups get mad at Facebook for different reasons, so inevitably they get a lot of hate.

In the context of the whistleblower:

One of the popular methods of manipulation is to use "harmful to children" as a basis for making an argument. We have seen this countless times in the past on a variety of issues. This is no different. The "harms" that are being highlighted here are equally, if not more, applicable to adults. Children are at a stage in their lives where good parenting can easily offset any potential harm by consuming content on Instagram or Facebook.

One can recognize that this particular topic, like many contemporary topics, is a subset of the overarching libertarianism versus authoritarianism debate, and opinions often cleanly fall on political lines depending on the complaint. In this case the whistleblower has left-of-center politics, so they have a grievance with "disinformation" and "not enough control". There have been previous whistleblowers who have had right-of-center politics, who have cited "censorship" and "biased control" as their grievance. There is ample evidence for the company being guilty of both, with regard to specific instances.

As such there will always be complaints from opposing points of view as to whether the company is doing "enough" to police content, or whether the policing has become biased. Amusingly, you see the reverse of this debate when you look at actual policing in the USA, where the opposite side argues bias in policing and the other side argues for harsher control and punishment.

Those who fall on either side of the spectrum tend to paint with a broad brush some kind of systemic evil conspiratorial agenda at the company, as a consequence of voicing their respective frustrations.

Overall Facebook is a net positive for the world. There are likely activists within the company trying to push agendas, some of whom may be prevailing over others. This is evident by just taking a walk around campus and reading the political messaging that adorns the various shared spaces. These are also largely irrelevant in the long term because if and when it reaches any sort of extreme, eventually the pendulum will swing too far.

I suspect you, like I, have either minimal FB use or have healthy guard rails for our use and expectations.

A non-trivial portion of the country doesn't have that mindset. Further, many in that group lack the understanding of FB's ability to influence wide-spread opinions.

I agree with you but I also don't live in the US.

The impact of Facebook on America is on a completely different playing field from us.

Agreed. Facebook is a mirror to society.

You may be one of the only ones, yes.

I have never signed up for Facebook but if my family members have ever "uploaded their phone contacts to find more Facebook Friends" or if my relatives have ever uploaded pictures with me in the picture ((Facebook has detected a face we don't recognize. Please tag the person in this picture)), or if I have a US Government Name and/or Social Security Number, there's a company that is building a DATABASE DOSSIER with information about me. I cannot ask them to please DELETE information they have about me because those Shadow Profiles are SECRET, I'm not even supposed to KNOW that these creepy data-scrapers have a file on me.

Facebook is just the front end for the NSA / surveillance state backend, and at this point it's frightening how Too Big to Fail they have become.

When you're designing a Big Brother dystopia in which everyone is tracked and surveilled, step one is to create something like Facebook. "All your friends are doing it! You should too!"

No, not the only one. I don't like the recent narrative that Facebook is an extremely evil corporation and responsible for most issues in the world. I think people overestimate the influence of Facebook and just want to live in a world where everything they don't agree with is fake news, controlled indirectly by Russia and spread through "useful idiots" (usually defined as people from the opposite side of political spectrum, because my political spectrum only consists of highly intelligent, emphatic people who analyze every news article in detail).

For me there's a useful distinction between guilt and shame. Guilt is where you fall short of your own standards and seek to rectify it. Shame is where you feel bad about falling short in the eyes of others.

Large corporations often perform shame, but they rarely behave as if key actors experience guilt. So they'll make reforms only as long as there's significant pushback.

If Zuckerberg actually cared, he would be writing letters like this even when the heat is off. He and they would have sincerely worked to fix these problems from early on.

Well phrased. He needs to take the complaints of harm at face value and acknowledge their reality.

Agreed. That was a moment for me when I decided to remove the Facebook app and eventually delete my account. A social network that forces you to look at garbage other than friends’ posts is not really a “social network”.

Well for all the money & resources they have, it's a pretty tone deaf message. No remorse or even the slightest admission that they could be doing better. Pretty much asking everyone to not believe what we've all been experiencing for the last few years.

I think you're missing some key nuance. Zuck mentions the research as industry leading because the research has uncovered something deeply embarrassing for Facebook.

It's relevant that this is "industry leading" because no one else has done this work. The implication is that the same patterns at Facebook are likely true with other forms of media.

> I’m not a fb apologist by any means, but maybe we should stop blaming these websites for everything and invest in education instead.

Even educated people are susceptible to content that is specifically designed to incite outrage and divide us. Facebook (and other sites) optimize for that type of content because it maximizes engagement. Teenage girls developing body image issues also apparently maximizes engagement.

If there's any framing here that absolves Facebook of culpability, it's that everyone else is doing it too, and that there are no laws/regulations in place to prevent it... But even then, it's still obviously immoral to anyone paying attention, and the employees responsible for it at Facebook have no excuse for not realizing that. They chose to act immorally.

I appreciate both you pointing this out AND the dunks on Zuck both here and on his post at FB. I'm surprised they didn't set up a custom algorithm to bury the most critical responses at his post.

Anyway, here's an attempt at some thoughtful nuance:

There's lots of wisdom readily available out there that describes how to most responsibly deal with critical feedback. For example Rapoport's Rules (via Dan Dennett). First you express the other's position so they can say "yes, that's exactly how I feel". Then, you describe where you agree and what you've learned. Finally, you can go into where you disagree.

Another framing is to ask "what is true in the feedback?" with the presumption that there is truth to be found.

This and other approaches are all about maximizing what to actually learn from feedback.

By contrast, Mark's post is a textbook-worthy demonstration of how to be politely defensive, even being candid about your emotional vulnerabilities, recognizing your frustrations, not lashing out in anger… all while admitting absolutely ZERO about anything in the criticism having any merit or opening any questions to really grapple with. At its best, his letter says "I'm really saddened about how my work is misunderstood, and I don't want to blame the critics, but I'll work to get past my reactive feelings and go back to continuing my wonderful work that has been so unfairly maligned".

I'll grant that this is more mature than a tantrum that attacks the critics and spreads rumors and lies about them. Zuckerberg is a more thoughtful and nicer person than Donald Trump.

Why would anybody defend Zuck or Facebook? He hired the political activist that leaked all these documents, knowingly and expected a different result? Just like Google, these corporations don't seem to learn their lessons and act surprised when these activist employees betray them?

Odd. Doesn’t seem to require log in for me. The post just loads without having to click anything.

I wanted to share a note I wrote to everyone at our company.

--- Hey everyone: it's been quite a week, and I wanted to share some thoughts with all of you.

First, the SEV that took down all our services yesterday was the worst outage we've had in years. We've spent the past 24 hours debriefing how we can strengthen our systems against this kind of failure. This was also a reminder of how much our work matters to people. The deeper concern with an outage like this isn't how many people switch to competitive services or how much money we lose, but what it means for the people who rely on our services to communicate with loved ones, run their businesses, or support their communities.

Second, now that today's testimony is over, I wanted to reflect on the public debate we're in. I'm sure many of you have found the recent coverage hard to read because it just doesn't reflect the company we know. We care deeply about issues like safety, well-being and mental health. It's difficult to see coverage that misrepresents our work and our motives. At the most basic level, I think most of us just don't recognize the false picture of the company that is being painted.

Many of the claims don't make any sense. If we wanted to ignore research, why would we create an industry-leading research program to understand these important issues in the first place? If we didn't care about fighting harmful content, then why would we employ so many more people dedicated to this than any other company in our space -- even ones larger than us? If we wanted to hide our results, why would we have established an industry-leading standard for transparency and reporting on what we're doing? And if social media were as responsible for polarizing society as some people claim, then why are we seeing polarization increase in the US while it stays flat or declines in many countries with just as heavy use of social media around the world?

At the heart of these accusations is this idea that we prioritize profit over safety and well-being. That's just not true. For example, one move that has been called into question is when we introduced the Meaningful Social Interactions change to News Feed. This change showed fewer viral videos and more content from friends and family -- which we did knowing it would mean people spent less time on Facebook, but that research suggested it was the right thing for people's well-being. Is that something a company focused on profits over people would do?

The argument that we deliberately push content that makes people angry for profit is deeply illogical. We make money from ads, and advertisers consistently tell us they don't want their ads next to harmful or angry content. And I don't know any tech company that sets out to build products that make people angry or depressed. The moral, business and product incentives all point in the opposite direction. But of everything published, I'm particularly focused on the questions raised about our work with kids. I've spent a lot of time reflecting on the kinds of experiences I want my kids and others to have online, and it's very important to me that everything we build is safe and good for kids.

The reality is that young people use technology. Think about how many school-age kids have phones. Rather than ignoring this, technology companies should build experiences that meet their needs while also keeping them safe. We're deeply committed to doing industry-leading work in this area. A good example of this work is Messenger Kids, which is widely recognized as better and safer than alternatives. We've also worked on bringing this kind of age-appropriate experience with parental controls for Instagram too. But given all the questions about whether this would actually be better for kids, we've paused that project to take more time to engage with experts and make sure anything we do would be helpful.

Like many of you, I found it difficult to read the mischaracterization of the research into how Instagram affects young people. As we wrote in our Newsroom post explaining this: "The research actually demonstrated that many teens we heard from feel that using Instagram helps them when they are struggling with the kinds of hard moments and issues teenagers have always faced. In fact, in 11 of 12 areas on the slide referenced by the Journal -- including serious areas like loneliness, anxiety, sadness and eating issues -- more teenage girls who said they struggled with that issue also said Instagram made those difficult times better rather than worse."

But when it comes to young people's health or well-being, every negative experience matters. It is incredibly sad to think of a young person in a moment of distress who, instead of being comforted, has their experience made worse. We have worked for years on industry-leading efforts to help people in these moments and I'm proud of the work we've done. We constantly use our research to improve this work further. Similar to balancing other social issues, I don't believe private companies should make all of the decisions on their own. That's why we have advocated for updated internet regulations for several years now. I have testified in Congress multiple times and asked them to update these regulations. I've written op-eds outlining the areas of regulation we think are most important related to elections, harmful content, privacy, and competition.

We're committed to doing the best work we can, but at some level the right body to assess tradeoffs between social equities is our democratically elected Congress. For example, what is the right age for teens to be able to use internet services? How should internet services verify people's ages? And how should companies balance teens' privacy while giving parents visibility into their activity? If we're going to have an informed conversation about the effects of social media on young people, it's important to start with a full picture. We're committed to doing more research ourselves and making more research publicly available.

That said, I'm worried about the incentives that are being set here. We have an industry-leading research program so that we can identify important issues and work on them. It's disheartening to see that work taken out of context and used to construct a false narrative that we don't care. If we attack organizations making an effort to study their impact on the world, we're effectively sending the message that it's safer not to look at all, in case you find something that could be held against you. That's the conclusion other companies seem to have reached, and I think that leads to a place that would be far worse for society. Even though it might be easier for us to follow that path, we're going to keep doing research because it's the right thing to do.

I know it's frustrating to see the good work we do get mischaracterized, especially for those of you who are making important contributions across safety, integrity, research and product. But I believe that over the long term if we keep trying to do what's right and delivering experiences that improve people's lives, it will be better for our community and our business. I've asked leaders across the company to do deep dives on our work across many areas over the next few days so you can see everything that we're doing to get there.

When I reflect on our work, I think about the real impact we have on the world -- the people who can now stay in touch with their loved ones, create opportunities to support themselves, and find community. This is why billions of people love our products. I'm proud of everything we do to keep building the best social products in the world and grateful to all of you for the work you do here every day.

I don't get the hate for the guy. Dude needs to sell ads, just like everyone else.

Thank you for asking!

No, but I have an excellent compression algorithm that is completely lossless in the semantic domain.

I think Zuck writes them himself and nobody has the cojones to edit.

Facebook has had a really consistent, weird, “true believer” voice over the years. I can’t believe they can keep indoctrinated PR folks around that long.

It’s pretty scary. The dude is too rich and powerful.

No, but I have generated the look at Mark Zuckerberg's face as he was writing it: https://rybakov.com/images/hiq/sadmark4.jpg

FB is special right now because of an internal whistleblower with data right now. That’s all.

Google - YouTube

I think you're dead wrong on this. Mark Zuckerburg is actually in an almost unique position that he has full control of facebook, so he can do literally anything he wants. He doesn't have to prioritize profit or shareholder value, he could sit in his board meeting just continually insulting his board's family members. He really does believe in what he's doing.

The problem is that sitting in your basement coding in PHP isn't going to give you the right grounding in psychology, sociology, and politics that runninng a social network will need. Being a billionaire at the age of 23 also doesn't give you a great lesson in how to learn from mistakes, and take criticism. All the way through his management of facebook Mark has been getting dragged through lessons about life that only a teenage boy in his bedroom needed to learn because he never got a life to learn them.

I don’t like to use Facebook, but extended family events are often planned on Facebook, local businesses sometime only use Facebook and Marketplace has become a popular alternative to Craigslist.

As usual, it’s not that simple. It should be ok to complain about Facebook and ask it to be better.

I think a lot of people don’t have the self awareness to realize the impacts on their own personal life. Many people aren’t able to be introspective or even fathom the possibility of potential defects of the internet or social media. It’s one thing to say the thing itself is bad. It’s another to say what’s it’s doing to them is bad and they need to initiate change for themselves. People get addicted to habits/ mindsets and that’s just as powerful as drugs.Understand your audience.

That being said, a large number of people are also pleased and are either able to use it without being affected by the negative effects or being ok with them/ not believing they are being harmed. I believe technology and the ability to connect can be a powerful and positive force when used in a healthy way.

The reality is that people would stop drinking soda, smoking cigarettes, binge drink alcohol, or sit in a chair 12 hours a day, if they were really that bad for you.

Isn't twitter just some sort of tiny echo chamber? Don't we regularly see these studies claimg that only 2%of the users generate 99% of the content? Twitter is only harmful to businesses who hire marketing firms who think twitter is representative of the general population.

> I don't get why Twitter always gets a free pass on the harms from misinformation.

Twitter is where all main stream journalists are. They are not going to bite the hand that "feed" them. Facebook on the other hand has still some amount of non political correctness on their platform so that's something main stream media who wants to control speech online cannot stand.

> I think it's because Twitter is seen as doing more (banning Trump, putting notifications on posts), but is that actually the case relative to what FB is doing?

Twitter certainly has a tighter moderation when it comes to "moderating" alleged conservative speech, yes, which is what matters to the former camp.

I am so glad to see this issue with Ethiopia is coming out! https://www.theguardian.com./technology/2021/oct/07/facebook...

Not when Facebook act as a polarizing echo chamber.

Yeah, I miss an update or two per month due to that msg, but a couple seconds later it's a forgotten thought.

There is a "Not now" button to bypass login

> Does he have any clue whatsoever what impact that his majority control over Facebook has over the behavior of the world?

Of course! He probably likes it that way.

>If we wanted to ignore research, why would we create an industry-leading research program to understand these important issues in the first place?

I wonder why tobacco companies studied lung cancer and oil companies studied climate change. Was it because those industries thought those issues were more important than profit?

Not to mention that they have been anything but transparent with their research. What he said is pretty much a complete lie.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/20/technology/facebook-popul...

Nothing this “whistleblower” has said is revelatory… she’s stating things we already know. The question should be “why now?”.

What “does his majority control over Facebook” have to do with the accusations about Facebook’s behavior? Would the behavior be ok if it were majority controlled by mutual funds?

Answering a suppositional question with yet another question is, well, questionable. But, hey, if we're going to play games like this, then I'm game to take a stab at answering these questions to questions with yet even more questions.

> If we wanted to ignore research, why would we create an industry-leading research program to understand these important issues in the first place? - Because it allows you to learn potential results before anyone else, thus giving you the advantage to control the narrative by releasing first?

> If we didn't care about fighting harmful content, then why would we employ so many more people dedicated to this than any other company in our space -- even ones larger than us? - Because the cost of that labor is relatively cheap in comparison to your earnings, and making a visible effort (however well or poorly executed) gives you a convenient scapegoat to point toward in exactly these types of situations?

> If we wanted to hide our results, why would we have established an industry-leading standard for transparency and reporting on what we're doing? - Because if you don't make it appear like you're playing ball, senators and congressmen would be more motivated to hammer down your door to appease their constituencies?

> ... if social media were as responsible for polarizing society as some people claim, then why are we seeing polarization increase in the US while it stays flat or declines in many countries with just as heavy use of social media around the world? - Because you don't apply the same algorithms or suggest the same content across all geographic locations?

Also, industry-leading research? Those leaked internal data about instagram are worse than an undergrad term paper. Look at those n values, for something as big as Fb that’s not even serious research.

"The best way to predict the future is to create it."

He should ask the tobacco industry or the oil industry. History rhymes.

Same reason the tobacco industry created research programs to look at the health effects of smoking. Neither their nor Facebook's research could ever be mistaken of "industry-leading", though.

"If I supposedly murdered my wife, why would I put a $1mm bounty on finding the killer?"

I can't believe his PR handlers let that get out.

As someone else said in the comments already, today's testimony wasn't about whether or not Facebook does research, it was about them hiding the results when they didn't support whatever drivel FB marketing puts out about changing the world for the good of all mankind.

This is so incredibly on brand for Zuckerberg (and Sandberg). This sort of gaslighting FUD is exactly what they always do when they get caught lying. They just lie more.

“We’ve investigated ourselves and found no wrongdoing.” What more could you want?

Ok...

First off there's no way Zuckerberg wrote this. Might've been involved but these are the words of a marketing team working with a legal team.

Secondly why do you see Zuckerberg as a great CEO?

Zuckerberg IS facebook. He controls it. Who's to say even if the main FB app and IG app and WhatsApp apps all lost their entire userbases and revenues went to 0.05% of what they are now, that he wouldn't just run the 500 person skeleton of what they currently are and just focus on his latest pet project, whether it be VR or something else. Honestly that's what I'd do if I was a billionaire with a passion for technology and a failing company but with millions in cash reserves.

Is there a social media that's actually "better" than Facebook? It's still not clear to me why Facebook is so much worse than Twitter, youtube, reddit, tik tok, etc. I think any social media, with significant adoption will have the same issues that we observe with facebook right?

Well you've demonstrated pretty clearly why you don't write public statements for large companies.

> stop falling for authoritarian claptrap

If only it were so easy.