Intrepid tech journalist Kara Swisher, Editor at Large of Recode, landed a major interview this week with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Swisher was very vocal on social media during the Congressional hearings on Cambridge Analytica earlier this year. She felt that Zuckerberg had gotten off easy as many Senators lobbed softball questions at the billionaire CEO of the world's largest social network. Facebook finally invited Swisher down to their headquarters in Menlo Park, California to discuss a range of issues mainly focusing on the company's management of user data, fake news, and hate speech.
One of the most baffling moments of the nearly 90 minute interview on the Recode Decode podcast was a moment when Facebook's CEO defended the rights of holocaust deniers on his platform. "I’m Jewish, and there’s a set of people who deny that the Holocaust happened," said Zuckerberg. "I find that deeply offensive. But at the end of the day, I don’t believe that our platform should take that down because I think there are things that different people get wrong. I don’t think that they’re intentionally getting it wrong..."
For a company that is at the center of the fake news epidemic, it is simply baffling to hear the CEO defend users' rights to post false information. "What we will do is we’ll say, 'Okay, you have your page, and if you’re not trying to organize harm against someone, or attacking someone, then you can put up that content on your page, even if people might disagree with it or find it offensive.' But that doesn’t mean that we have a responsibility to make it widely distributed in News Feed."
Zuckerberg continually dodged Swisher's direct question about InfoWars, breaking down the company's core philosophy. "There are really two core principles at play here. There’s giving people a voice, so that people can express their opinions. Then, there’s keeping the community safe, which I think is really important."
Facebook's desire to give people a voice comes with the trade-offs of free speech, but this highlights the biggest problem with the platform. People have the right to share false information, which can go viral. To manually moderate the two billion monthly active users is impossible, and the company is leaning heavily on AI to help prevent potential harm to the community.
Shacknews was affected by these changes earlier this year when Facebook labeled our site as spam, deleting 90 percent of our posts without warning. An even dumber example of the flaw in trusting AI for moderation of posts occurred during E3 2018, when Shacknews attempted to run two video advertisements on Facebook for our Chairpet of the Board election. My dog Lola's satirical campaign video was approved for a boost on Facebook while our Video Editor Greg Burke's cat Nessie was rejected by Facebook's artificial intelligence.
Facebook has created a platform where hate speech, and fake news continues to fester. They are a publicly traded company with a profit motive, and the sentiments shared today by Mark Zuckerberg shouldn't leave anyone more confident in Facebook's ability to properly protect their community from false information. Much of what the CEO said in the interview with Kara Swisher was recycled PR mumbo jumbo, but when he attempted to speak from the heart he created another outrage online as he defended the rights of deniers of the holocaust. After the piece ran on Recode.net, Zuckerberg provided an update. “I personally find Holocaust denial deeply offensive, and I absolutely didn’t intend to defend the intent of people who deny that.”
It isn't about Zuckerberg's personal feelings about Holocaust deniers. It is the fact that he is willingly defending his users rights to post false information. Facebook boosted plenty of fake news leading up to the 2016 election, and we can only hope that they will be as strict leading up to this Fall's midterm elections as they were denying our Chairpet of the Board advertisement for Nessie the cat.
Zuckerberg was also pushed by Swisher regarding the Cambridge Analytica debacle to hold someone at the company accountable to which he replied, "But look, I designed the platform, so if someone’s going to get fired for this, it should be me." If only, Zuck. If only.
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