Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

how many stupid things you said at 19 made you $100B? I'm pretty sure that if a stupid thing you said at 19 had made you a $100B by the age of 30 and continued to made many billions after that you'd pretty much continue to believe and follow that stupid thing.

here's a business model for it:

Implement ActivityPub (an existing protocol recommended by the W3C), and offer their underlying social networking services as hosted and managed software for big orgs to operate on their own domain. With interoperability, they'll work across domains. Target customer is anyone with at least 100K followers (so gov, institutions, media, et cetera).

That isn't the issue. The issue is that good-faith arguments are downvoted as well. If you are Republican, there are certain ideas that will instantly get downvoted simply because of your political affiliation. You could say, the most abundant element in the atmosphere is Nitrogen as a Republican and you'd get a bunch of downvotes and people arguing just cause they think all Republicans are anti-vax idiots.

Same with Democrats depending on where you are and what you're commenting on. People are polarized to the point that they no longer care what you have to say. If they think you're with the other political party it is instant downvote.

Ah, great question. The pattern I'm pointing to is a little subtle. I think at this point it pays to be extremely sceptical of Zuckerberg.

(Quoting from Zuckerberg's original post)

> "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?"

This certainly needs a citation. Ethnic conflict in Ethiopia, division in Britain around Brexit, and US polarization would seem to be obvious counter examples. It should certainly be said that correlation is not causation. Also, note that the claim that 'social media doesn't cause polarization anywhere / everywhere in the world' is a subtle bait and switch from "Facebook causes polarization in certain areas" or "Facebook's lack of robust, well-staffed safety mechanisms allow it to be exploited to cause polarization in certain areas."

> "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?"

There is more than one way to care about a research program, but absolute amount of budget spent on X is not the same thing as relative budget priority. For a company that made 54 billion in profit last quarter, it'd be more surprising if they had no research program. Zuckerberg does not present any specifics here -- what percentage of gross revenue is the research program? How many people are employed to fight content, and how does this compare to how many people are employed to encourage growth? And what's the point of research if the results are not acted upon? The whistleblower was pretty clear that the research doesn't matter even if suggested fixes will cause a Speaking of Meaningful Social Interactions (MSI), the whistleblower specifically said that there is a foundational problem with how MSI is defined, because it includes the number of comments a post receives. Even without intending it, it is easy to see that controversial posts will attract more attention. Zuckerberg cites no evidence about the relative percentage of comments that are angry vs other emotions, and how this has changed.

> "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."

Zuckerberg is complaining about incentive problems? The whistleblower has said that Facebook's very policies make it "not care" even if individuals do. This is also what comes across in the WSJ articles. In other words: the narrative isn't false, and this has been documented. His point about the specific incentive problem of leaked research is interesting, but it's a case of an abstract concern (for other company's research) vs. very real and well documented harm Facebook is a) doing now, and b) per the whistleblower, is unequipped to solve alone.

Also, at one point in Zuckerberg's missive, he shifts the locus of responsibility from Facebook to Congress: "..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?" Deciding what the "right" age is can take several forms. A panel of seasoned jurists, child psychologists, policy experts, etc., can spend a long time debating what the "right" age is in the universal sense. Or, Facebook could take stand, err on the side of caution, and say that 17 is a better age than 13, and detail why they think so.

It's hard to say how things would have gone differently, but I don't think it would have been much different. Looking at the ISP world today long after the dust settled, it's not that much different from the Bell era in terms of consumer choices. I have one choice in ISP for my address. A de facto monopoly entrenched by a lackadaisical attitude towards expanding infrastructure connectivity.