Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook’s hardest year, and what comes next
This was a good interview to listen to and Ezra Klein asked some good questions. Unfortunately Zuckerberg&#x27;s answers weren&#x27;t satisfactory.<p>Responding to Tim Cook:<p>&gt;You know, I find that argument, that if you’re not paying that somehow we can’t care about you, to be extremely glib and not at all aligned with the truth. The reality here is that if you want to build a service that helps connect everyone in the world, then there are a lot of people who can’t afford to pay. And therefore, as with a lot of media, having an advertising-supported model is the only rational model that can support building this service to reach people.<p>&gt;That doesn’t mean that we’re not primarily focused on serving people. I think probably to the dissatisfaction of our sales team here, I make all of our decisions based on what’s going to matter to our community and focus much less on the advertising side of the business.<p>&gt;But if you want to build a service which is not just serving rich people, then you need to have something that people can afford. I thought Jeff Bezos had an excellent saying on this in one of his Kindle launches a number of years back. He said, “There are companies that work hard to charge you more, and there are companies that work hard to charge you less.” And at Facebook, we are squarely in the camp of the companies that work hard to charge you less and provide a free service that everyone can use.<p>&gt;I don’t think at all that that means that we don’t care about people. To the contrary, I think it’s important that we don’t all get Stockholm syndrome and let the companies that work hard to charge you more convince you that they actually care more about you. Because that sounds ridiculous to me.<p>The fact is advertising business models, like Facebook, have inherent conflicts that Apple doesn&#x27;t have. Paying directly for a product that you&#x27;re going to use creates a beautiful alignment of interests. Even Microsoft wasn&#x27;t as beautifully aligned as Apple was&#x2F;is because Windows was sold to CIOs and IT departments and not the person who was going to actually use it.<p>&quot;Apple is for rich people&quot; would have been excellent jujtsu if not for that leaked memo, at least rhetorically. Unfortunately that memo laid bare for everyone to see exactly what Facebook as an organization and a culture prioritizes, and reveals that all of Facebook&#x27;s public statements made after privacy scandals over the years, as well as Zuckerberg&#x27;s protestations that he cares about the user over &quot;connecting the world&quot; (euphemism for increasing engagement and thus ad growth), were complete bullshit. Ezra refers to Tristan Harris&#x27; comment that Zuckerberg couldn&#x27;t do anything that decreased engagement by 50%, which is completely right and zeros right in on that inherent conflict in ad business models.<p>On the ethnic cleansing in Myanmar and Facebook&#x27;s role (I&#x27;m going to quote Ezra because Mark&#x27;s answer is garbage and a complete dodge):<p>&gt;One of the scary stories I’ve read about Facebook over the past year is that it had become a real source of anti-Rohingya propaganda in Myanmar, and thus become part of an ethnic cleansing. Phil Robertson, who’s a deputy director of Human Rights Watch in Asia, made the point that Facebook is dominant for news information in Myanmar but Myanmar is not an incredibly important market for Facebook. It doesn’t get the attention we give things that go wrong in America. I doubt you have a proportionate amount of staff in Myanmar to what you have in America. And he said the result is you end up being like “an absentee landlord” in Southeast Asia.<p>&gt;Is Facebook too big to manage its global scale in some of these other countries, the ones we don’t always talk about in this conversation, effectively?<p>This gets to the heart of the matter. Facebook (and Google with YouTube) are just too big for them to even grasp what&#x27;s going on on their platforms. &quot;Absentee landlord&quot; is such an apt way to put it. These companies sneeze and the ripples are massively world changing, from election meddling to fucking ethnic cleansing.<p>The only real solution to this is regulation on a global scale. Antitrust, privacy regulation, Germany&#x27;s hate speech law applying to social networks (this won&#x27;t happen in the US for obvious reasons); all of it has to be on the table.