What Next - Is Mark Zuckerberg Gaslighting You?
What Next | Daily News and Analysis
Slate Podcasts
4.3 • 2.4K Ratings
🗓️ 11 March 2019
⏱️ 20 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Facebook is reshuffling its priorities and making moves that could help it evade antitrust regulators. Will it affect users that much? No. Is it solving a problem users have been talking about? Not really. So what is Mark Zuckerberg’s latest blog post all about?
Guest: Will Oremus, Slate’s senior tech writer and co-host of the podcast If/Then.
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Podcast production by Mary Wilson, Jayson De Leon, and Anna Martin.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | When you imagine Mark Zuckerberg sitting down to write a blog post like the one he released last week, |
| 0:12.1 | like what do you picture? Well, first of all, I picture Mark working very closely with his PR team. |
| 0:19.9 | This is Will Aramis. He writes about the tech industry here at Slate. |
| 0:23.5 | This is something they've been working on for a long time. |
| 0:25.8 | I can't imagine Mark just stayed up late one night with some extra coffee and banged this out between midnight and 3 a.m. |
| 0:35.3 | Yeah, blog post, I feel like it's more casual than what this is. It's |
| 0:40.1 | 3,200 words. I call it a manifesto. I also notice it was published in full in the New York Times. |
| 0:51.5 | And when I saw that, the only thing that went through my head, I was like, |
| 0:54.9 | this is like the state of the union or something. Right. And I don't think that's crazy. |
| 1:00.9 | Facebook is a union of sorts that includes some two billion people. And Zuckerberg has sort of |
| 1:07.8 | autocratic control over this network that shapes the way we all communicate |
| 1:12.5 | on a daily basis. So I think it's good that he is thinking hard about what that platform should be |
| 1:20.0 | and that we're all paying close attention to what his thoughts are and scrutinizing them and |
| 1:23.9 | dissecting what it might mean for us. This blog post, manifesto, whatever you want to call it, |
| 1:30.5 | it seems to be all about privacy. After accusations that Facebook peddled user data to companies |
| 1:36.7 | like Netflix and Microsoft, Zuckerberg is saying, all right already, I hear you. And if you're |
| 1:43.1 | rolling your eyes right now, Will says, |
| 1:45.8 | stop. You know, some people reacted to this by just sort of brushing it off. Look, this is just a |
| 1:51.2 | hollow PR gesture. It doesn't really mean anything. I think there's probably some truth to that, |
| 1:56.9 | but I also think there's more here. You don't write this kind of manifesto without having in mind some real changes to what the business is and what it's doing. |
| 2:08.7 | And the thing is, Facebook's business has become a central part of everyone's life. |
| 2:14.2 | Will scoured all 3,220 words of this document, trying to understand what this manifesto is going to mean for the citizens of Facebook. |
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