
Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t understand free speech in the 21st century - kawera
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/oct/18/mark-zuckerberg-free-speech-21st-century
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Barrin92
The article is right on that Zuckerberg when giving interviews doesn't seem to
be able to articulate what the company's policies are, how they fit into legal
frameworks, what the response would be if the model of the company was
fundamentally broken, and so on.

This was really apparent in the interview he did with Yuval Noah Harari. When
Harari asked him what would happen if "connecting the world" wasn't actually a
positive thing, Zuckerberg didn't really have a coherent answer other then
going on about how free expression is always great and how it's in the
American constitution or whatever.

That's something that I've noticed when a lot of these CEOs are interviewed or
when one reads their books. You expect to encounter some profound insight but
it is surprising how shallow, uneducated and out of their depth these people
are when it comes to placing their companies in some historical or political
context. It's like they've done nothing but trying to make money to the point
where they've forgotten why they're doing anything, a bunch of facile PR
slogans aside. No self-awareness, no reflection, no ability to consider the
broad impact of their behaviour. The most philosophical you're going to get is
likely a tract on the AI apocalypse.

~~~
hos234
He is basically the John Hammond character in Jurassic Park.

He will continue to cling to his creation well after the power goes out, the
kids are missing and the Raptors and T-Rex are loose. Only problem is he
hasn't been running this experiment on an island but on 2 billion lab rats.
Whether they are Generals, Janitors, Journalists or Teenagers everyone is
effected in ways no one fully understands yet.

So now we wait for more and more unintended consequences to mount. Because
it's not like a Zuckerberg replacement is going to do any better. This is a
problem that has only one solution.

Eventually the park will be shut down and be rebuilt after we understand the
psychological and sociological dynamics such networks produces at scale. Right
now his answer to Harari is incoherent because no one knows what the answer
is. And it's impossible to figure it out while watching the current experiment
gone of the rails.

Micheal Crichton however, did provide a possible answer to Harari's question
20 years ago - "I think cyberspace means the end of our species. It means the
end of innovation. This idea that the whole world is wired together is mass
death. Every biologist knows that small groups in isolation evolve fastest.
You put a thousand birds on an ocean island and they'll evolve very fast. You
put ten thousand on a big continent, and their evolution slows down. Now, for
our own species, evolution occurs mostly through our behaviour. We innovate
new behaviour to adapt. And everybody on earth knows that innovation only
occurs in small groups. Put three people on a committee and they may get
something done. Ten people, and it gets harder. Thirty people, and nothing
happens. Thirty million, it becomes impossible. That's the effect of mass
media - it keeps anything from happening. Mass media swamps diversity. It
makes every place the same. Bangkok or Tokyo or London: there's a McDonald's
on one corner, a Benetton on another, a Gap across the street. Regional
differences vanish. All differences vanish. In a mass-media world, there's
less of everything except the top ten books, records, movies, ideas. People
worry about losing species diversity in the rain forest. But what about
intellectual diversity - our most necessary resource? That's disappearing
faster than trees. But we haven't figured that out, so now we're planning to
put five billion people together in cyberspace. And it'll freeze the entire
species. Everything will stop dead in its tracks. Everyone will think the same
thing at the same time. Global uniformity"

~~~
kthejoker2
I mean, how crazy wrong is this prediction though? The web has increased
diversity (good and bad) through scale and virality and lower than ever
barriers to entry to the market of mindshare.

The monoculture is practically dead.

Fringe media is rampant.

Microinfluencers abound.

Filter bubbles are omnipresent.

The long tail has exploded thanks to global supply chains and the TFE.

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merpnderp
"...as if anyone beyond the growing collection of authoritarian dictators
seriously argues against it."

How can anyone take this person seriously when they seem completely oblivious
to the growing movement against free speech?

I'll back anyone promoting free speech in this regressive environment we find
ourselves in, where a plethora of people are arguing to go back to the
pre-20th century understanding of the first amendment where the rich and
powerful could crush speech they didn't like.

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mdorazio
I think Zuckerberg is out of touch with reality, but so is this article. It's
entirely possible to understand and support free speech as a concept and not
want to implement it within your own business because it would hurt profits.
Businesses are not governments or societies and we need to either stop acting
like they should be or start regulating them like they are.

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nabla9
> But here’s the thing: Zuckerberg was not wrong. He just could not articulate
> why.

This is what makes this discussion so frustrating. Avoiding discussion from
the principles.

There is the obvious common carrier vs. publication angle. Being common
carrier brings regulation, being publication brings legal liability. Facebook
want's neither, so the only option is to obfuscate.

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ineedasername
The article is probably correct that Zuck can't clearly articulate a logically
consistent plan, but the article also doesn't articulate well it's breasons
for this conclusion. It repeats and restates its claim that Facebook's policy
is incoherent but never actually does much to provide actual examples, much
less how it might improve upon it's position.

As such it's hard to come away with the impression that Zuckerberg himself
fails to understand these things, which is the primary claim here, or if this
is simply a thorny and complicated issue that doesn't allow for easy
straightforward answers.

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dekhn
I think the right way to think about Zuck is that he's a libertarian absolute
free-speecher who assumes everybody is intelligent enough to decode propaganda
and evaluate truth on its merits. He also has a lot of practical experience
with actually running a system that has to make controversial calls about
information. And he runs a product with >1B users.

It's not easy for a person like Zuck to talk to normals, because he's not
normal and he has data most people don't have access to. Working inside an
internet company that deals with billions of users, you start to see/learn
things about how people behave on the internet, you see state-sponsored actors
trying to influence elections, etc, and you see it without hte spin and bias
of the media.

I'm not defending zuck other than to say that at least he's articulated a
position that defines the base philosophy of his platform.

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arbuge
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends
on his not understanding it.”

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dredmorbius
For those interested in Zuckerberg's actual comments, which are referenced but
not linked, video (dead air & intro skipped):

[https://youtube.com/watch?v=2MTpd7YOnyU&t=9m](https://youtube.com/watch?v=2MTpd7YOnyU&t=9m)

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gaogao
Mark Zuckerberg's free speech drive is mostly just a political game to try to
stave off the threat of regulation by Republicans concerned about "silencing
conservative voices."

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buboard
What a drivel! An attack by someone who appears to hold the patent on Free
Speech (TM) against a billionaire who is uneducated and thus unable to use
free speech to talk about free speech, because, frankly, he didn't pay
hundreds of thousands to get a degree in the liberal arts of bullshitting like
this author did. You could replace zuckerberg with "layperson" in the essay
(because, well he is a layperson) and it would read like a very childish sneer
about nothing. Still, good job on fulfilling the monthly "FB hate articles"
quota.

~~~
vixen99
Drivel is a verb.

~~~
doubleunplussed
No, it's a noun. 'what a drivel' sounds wrong because it is a mass noun, just
like you can't say "a sugar".

~~~
dredmorbius
Depends on how you refer to it. Dextrose is a sugar. She is my sugar. That is
a bowl of sugar.

(Similarly for water/waters.)

I'm not familiar with a general usage describing species of drivel in singular
terms, however.

~~~
doubleunplussed
Yes, many mass nouns have a corresponding count noun with a slightly different
meaning. A [type of] sugar, a [glass of] water. I was trying to think of
example where this can't be done, but even "a [molecule of] dextrose" is
something I could imagine a chemist saying.

