Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook’s hardest year, and what comes next

The Gray Area with Sean Illing

Vox Media Podcast Network

Politics, News, News Commentary, Philosophy, Society & Culture

4.5 • 11.1K Ratings

🗓️ 2 April 2018

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

It’s been a tough year for Facebook. The social networking juggernaut found itself engulfed by controversies over fake news, electoral interference, privacy violations, and a broad backlash to smartphone addiction. Wall Street has noticed: the company has lost almost $100 billion in market cap in recent weeks. Behind Facebook’s hard year is a collision between the company’s values, ambitions, business model, and mindboggling scale. Mark Zuckerberg, the site’s founder, has long held that the company’s mission is to make the world more open and connected — with the assumption being that a more open and connected world is a better world. But a more open world can make it easier for governments to undermine each other’s elections from afar; a more connected world can make it easier to spread hatred and incite violence. So has Facebook become too big to manage, and too dangerous when it fails? Should the social infrastructure of the global community be managed by a corporation headquartered in Northern California? What’s Zuckerberg’s reply to Apple CEO Tim Cook, who says the social media giant’s business model is at odds with its users’ interests? And how has all this changed Zuckerberg’s ambitions for Facebook’s future, and confidence in its mission? Zuckerberg and I talk about all of this and more in this conversation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Because we didn't invest enough, I think we will dig through this hole,
0:04.3	but it will take a few years.
0:06.0	I wish I could solve all these issues in three months or six months,
0:09.6	but I just think the reality is that solving some of these questions
0:12.5	is just going to take a longer period of time.
0:26.4	Hello, welcome to the Ezra Clanchon, the Box Media Podcast Network.
0:29.4	My guest today, you may remember from such social media platforms as Facebook.com.
0:35.1	My guest is Mark Zuckerberg, who has been in the news,
0:38.3	along with his platform quite a bit lately.
0:41.9	I have been thinking in the past couple of months about something he wrote in,
0:46.4	I think it was February of 2017, and it's really this remarkable document that I recommend
0:52.0	you go look up if you have some time. It's a manifesto about what Facebook can and should be
0:57.7	for the future of the world. This was a moment when people were actually talking about Zuckerberg
1:01.6	as a 2020 presidential candidate. He was on this sub-ipiculier nationwide tour, where he was meeting
1:07.3	with farmers in the Midwest. It had a lot of political dimensions to it, but he came out with his
1:13.1	manifesto, where he offered up a really profoundly ambitious vision for Facebook.
1:19.6	A vision for Facebook that did nothing less than situate Facebook within a broader
1:25.9	architecture of human social evolution. Talking about humankind, he wrote,
1:30.8	today we are close to taking our next step. Our greatest opportunities are now global,
1:35.2	like spreading prosperity and freedom, promoting peace and understanding, lifting people out of
1:38.8	poverty and accelerating science. Our greatest challenges also need global responses,
1:43.2	like ending terrorism, fighting climate change, and preventing pandemics. Progress now requires
	...

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