Things from leaked audio of Mark Zuckerberg and his employees

In the US, there are more old people than young people actively using The Facebook.

> Which... can reasonably read as encouragement (or incitement, or glorification) of violence toward people.

Do you not see how I could just as easily use your empty standard to ban tweets saying “A riot is the language of the unheard.” -- a quote I largely agree with? This quote explains rioting as a consequence of oppression. But if I was as easily triggered as you, I'd have it banned since it "can reasonably [be] read as encouragement (or incitement, or glorification) of [rioting]" a definitionally illegal act.

And frankly, your interpretation of the Trump tweet is not reasonable. The most reasonable, common-sense interpretation is one linking severe consequences to severe actions. Does the phrase "When you play with fire, you're going to get burned" glorify burning people?

> Twitter is a part of the marketplace of ideas, is it not?

In the standard notion of a marketplace, you let decentralized end-users gravitate toward things they like and avoid things they don't like. If Trump's speech is so offensive, then let END-USERS decide to block his content or barrage his comments with condemnation or vote him out of office. Instead, you're advocating for a major centralized "authority" to make the decisions about tweets that should and shouldn't be seen, whether or not they're popular with the end-users. Yes, if they disagree that strongly with the censorship, those end-users can leave the platform, but that's analogous to "well, if you don't like it, then you can just leave". If people like something, they're rather fight to keep it good than let other people "ruin" it.

> ...whether the unoppressed is a straight man or a person who can threaten others with violence without consequence...

Mobs breaking windows, lighting things on fire, and stealing is violence. It exposes people to tremendous danger and tremendous injustice. Saying that violence begets violence should hardly be a controversial idea. I certainly don't think Trump's tweets are helpful in anyway. I think they're incredibly tone deaf and unhelpful. But I'm not going to cry to Twitter or Facebook and demand it be blocked.

Is it true that public education is being destroyed? I'm having trouble finding metrics by which it has declined. In terms of budget, 4.1% of US GDP is government expenditure on education. For comparison: Japan is 2.9%, Canada 4.3%, UK 4.3%. This number hasn't changed much. Over the past 20 years it has fluctuated between 4.1% and 4.7% of GDP.[1] There might be a slight downward trend, but if there is it has followed most of the other developed countries.

The US is a rich country. If anything, using percentage of GDP understates just how much we spend on education. For primary & secondary education (everything before college), there are only four countries in the world that spend more per student than the US: Luxembourg, Switzerland, Austria, and Norway. For post-secondary education (college and grad school), the US spends more per student than any other country.[2]

If you look at other metrics such as the percentage of adults with college degrees, or the percentage of adults who graduate high school, the US has never done better.[3][4] If you look at PISA scores, we're very close to the OECD average and that number hasn't changed much over time.[5] (Like most developed countries, absolute scores have slowly decreased over time. It's not clear why this is happening.)

If people have been working for decades to destroy public education, they're doing a very bad job of it.

1. https://data.oecd.org/eduresource/public-spending-on-educati...

2. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cmd.asp

3. https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2017/cb17-51....

4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_...

5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_International_St...

> So long as their speech remains legal, social media sites should not be the business of censoring elected officials.

With all due respect, I disagree entirely, and elected officials censor each other as a matter of doing business. social media sites should be designated as journals and subject to the same ethics as journalists. I think the novelty of harvesting personal data (as in, "Oh, you mean someone cares about my favorite color? Neat!") can be tempered by holding users to the same standard as journalists.

Social media sites are just journals. I am not going to allow Tinker Bell to sprinkle her magic pixie dust over Facebook and Twitter to give them some "special" status that allows them to avoid their journalistic responsibilities. They are in the journalism industry; they should lead, not beg for special consideration.

I like how o.p. edited the title of the original article from ‘Nine things we learned from leaked audio of Mark Zuckerberg facing his employees’. Good move. The ‘x thing you never knew’ format has become the hollow candy of internet-acquired knowledge.