In 1862, Abraham Lincoln addressed Congress. It was grim time for a country newly immersed in a civil war, but he saw opportunity in strife. Lincoln was only weeks away from signing the Emancipation Proclamation, and, to gain support, he was painting this audacious act as an out-of-the-box consequence of the current crisis. Here’s what the president of a nation torn asunder said:
This history lesson comes courtesy of Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Facebook, who quoted those words of Lincoln’s in a 5,700-word post he dropped on his timeline today. Citing such a lofty antecedent underlines the gravity of Zuckerberg’s message here. He is explicitly constructing no less than a roadmap for a new global social infrastructure. Though he takes pains to say that Facebook wants to be only part of a broad movement to build this social edifice, the post represents a significant shift for the company. It marks a broadening of its focus on connecting small groups and families to a more sweeping role in building larger and more meaningful communities on a global scale, to fill an increasingly worrisome gap in the social fabric.
Last week, as Zuckerberg was readying this mission statement for Facebook’s next era, I stopped by the company’s Menlo Park headquarters to get a preview of his thinking. There, sitting on the couch where he often conducts product reviews, and dressed in his standard gray T-shirt and jeans, he spoke about Facebook’s responsibility to a world where social connectivity has created many beneficial effects—and some not so beneficial. Facebook takes it as a core truth that sharing and connecting is a force that will improve the world. Indeed, at the advent of of social media we all thought that giving everybody a voice would help us all to be heard, and the world would be a more open and welcoming place. But in the wake of contentious elections in the US and abroad — and with a general sense that the world itself is slipping off the rails — critics are calling out Facebook as a source of destabilizing fake news hoaxes and isolating filter bubbles. Some people are even ending friendships over knee-jerk reactions to political differences expressed on the software he created. Zuckerberg himself admits that his company’s response — and indeed the company itself — is a work in progress. “It’s not as clear whether giving people a voice builds common understanding or fragments a shared sense of reality,” he says, though clearly every bone in his body believes the former.
With this post, Zuckerberg has chosen to address those issues by vastly expanding the discussion. Instead of getting bogged down in the specific controversy of fake news (though he does address it in his post), he’s placing it in the context of a bigger picture: a global crisis where humanity itself has edged away from comity and descended into tribalism and finger-pointing. This is our “stormy present,” as Abe put it, and Facebook is on it.
Because this message unrolls more like a State of the Union address than your typical Facebook post, it will undoubtedly fuel speculation that young Zuckerberg may be positioning himself to run for public office. (By the way, he turns 35 — the minimum age for the US president — in 2019.) But why accept what might well be a demotion? It’s true that one could dismiss Facebook as a global power with Stalin’s line to Churchill: “How many divisions does the Pope have?” But Facebook has a foreign policy —in the last year alone Zuckerberg has met with dozens of world leaders, including the Pope. And Facebook’s algorithms determine what information we see and who gets to share our news with us, and the majority of its 1.8 billion users show their support for it — in essence, they vote for it — by using the service every day.
Nonetheless, you might consider Zuckerberg’s post a counterpoint to the dark inauguration speech we recently witnessed. Unlike the one in D.C., Zuckerberg’s has specifics—it outlines a collaborative effort, with Facebook taking the initiative, to build a global set of meaningful communities with five purposes: support, safety, trusted and open information, civic engagement, and inclusion.
“One of the big questions people are thinking about — not just at Facebook but across the world — is that there’s all this division in the world,” Zuckerberg told me. “What can we [at Facebook] be doing that would be most productive to bring people together?” Though he sees this vision statement on the scale of his letter to shareholders at Facebook’s IPO five years ago, which set out the company’s purpose and defined its North Star of sharing, this letter is something different. It’s a position paper for the world more broadly, defining a gap in what we need to get along with each other and suggesting how social infrastructure and technology can address it. “I think of this as more about our view on what needs to get built in the world and where some of the stuff that we’re doing might be causing issues that we need to mitigate,” he said. His voice burning with intensity, he took me through his pillars of community point by point, using some of the language that would later appear in his post.
How did he reach his conclusions? “I read a lot and talk to people and then I see where our community is going,” he said.
Lately, Zuckerberg, like a lot of people, has been troubled by what he sees. “For most of Facebook’s existence we have always stood for connecting people and building a global community, but that has never been a controversial thing, right?” he said. “It’s like, yeah, people together, good. And now for the first time there’s actually these mainstream movements not just in the US but across the world that stand for withdrawing from global connections.”
I mentioned that some people interpret the current period as one of history’s organic swings from openness to oppression, and asked him if technologies like social networks can stem this otherwise organic tide. While conceding that history may indeed ebb and flow, he said, “I think the most productive way to think about this is not to fret about a near-term worsening but to stay focused on building the things that are necessary to reach the next stage that we all want to get to,” he said. That next stage, as he said in his post, is “building the long term social infrastructure to bring humanity together.”
At the heart of this idea is strong communities, particularly the ones he calls “very meaningful” groups. Examples include sufferers of a serious or rare disease, or parenting groups — stuff that becomes a vital part of your social life and even your support system. Over a hundred million Facebook users are in such very meaningful groups, but that’s well under ten percent of users. Zuckerberg envisions more, and Facebook wants to build tools to increase participation so that a billion people would “have communities that feel like they’re part of something bigger than themselves.” (Like many of Zuckerberg’s proposed tools for communities, he envisions that artificial intelligence will be part of the solution, in this case by matching people with groups that might be meaningful for them.)
But, I asked, if it’s the case that Facebook’s communities can bring people together, why is it that so many people on Facebook, many of whom know each other in real life, are now unfriending each other after one expresses a political preference that the other finds intolerable? Zuckerberg hopes to solve this through those meaningful communities where we see each other as more than just voices with opposing views. “I don’t think it’s fully proven, but I think if you engage with someone as a whole person, you are more likely to actually have a productive conversation,” he said.
In a larger sense, he said, Facebook is going to go beyond its traditional focus on small groups without a hierarchy to larger ones that will have designated leaders and sub-groups. This would allow many people to get meaning out of groups they care about, including churches and schools, without the randomness and misunderstandings that occur when organizations have large Facebook followings. “We haven’t built the tools for people to lead and evangelize groups,” he said. Presumably those strong leaders will be able to give groups more focus and direct them constructively.
Parts of Zuckerberg’s memo are destined to be controversial. Some people will probably chafe at the very idea of a corporate CEO determining the design principles by which our communities function, even if he has proven pretty adapt at getting people to participate in the world’s biggest network. And one of the most controversial pieces of this manifesto is the part where Zuckerberg describes how Facebook will help make people safe. “The biggest issue people face today are not ones that the current safety infrastructure of the world is set up to handle,” he said, implicitly suggesting that Facebook will be an extra-government component of the solution to this problem. Clearly no one will have a problem if the company builds on its Safety Check feature, which assures contacts of those in disaster zones that friends and family are accounted for. And expanding Facebook’s already considerable powers to unite people in rebuilding after a tragedy seems equally laudable. But the idea of using the world’s biggest social network, with AI-powered tools, as a giant alert system gets into questionable territory.
“We should be able to identify a lot of things that are going to be problems before they happen, whether it’s an individual who might commit suicide, or terrorist attacks,” Zuckerberg said. “Right now we’re trying to figure out if we can build AI systems to identify anyone who is using our networks for that so we can get rid of them and alert the right people.” When you operate at Facebook’s scale all sorts of unintended consequences emerge — look at the recent spate of murders captured on Facebook Live — so it’s a bit scary to contemplate Facebook as a system that’s keeping an eye on us for signals of misbehavior. I asked him about partnering with law enforcement on those issues. In a network of nearly two billion people, false positives would seem inevitable — is Facebook ready for stories of innocent people flagged as terrorists because its algorithms detected questionable patterns? When I brought this up, Zuckerberg hastened to emphasize that “protecting people’s privacy and civil liberties is a part of this.” He also reaffirmed his commitment to strong encryption. “I think these two things are not as much in conflict as some people would like you to think.”
Zuckerberg’s views on informed communities — and how they get their news — go well beyond the fake-news controversies that have bedeviled the company recently. The CEO himself admits that he didn’t help things by saying at a conference right after the election that he didn’t think fake news on his service affected the outcome. “I might have messed that one up by not giving the broader context, and people thought that the narrow thing was how I think about this broadly,” he said. “The question of common understanding and common ground is even bigger. Let’s say you can wave a magic wand and get rid of all misinformation. We could still be moving into a world where people are so polarized that they will use a completely different set of true facts to paint whatever narrative they want to fit their world view.”
I told Zuckerberg that right now my News Feed is basically…Trump, Trump, Trump, married, Trump, baby, Trump. I wondered how much of his News Feed was dominated by posts about our new president. “It’s a good amount,” he said. But he sees it as a temporary aberration. The issue for him is not just our domestic situation but “a serious global thing” where people need to be better informed — not just by news, but by each other. Though he touts recent tools that Facebook introduced to give lower rankings to inaccurate or overhyped news stories, he also admits that it’s a work in progress. “I just want to make sure there’s common ground that everyone has the ability to share what they want and that nuance doesn’t get lost,” he said.
Zuckerberg’s views on how Facebook can help civic engagement — letting people know who their representatives are, getting government information online, helping people organize political movements and protests — all seem to make sense. He tackles more challenging issues when envisioning means of “community governance” — where Facebook has to balance free speech while making sure that people’s News Feeds aren’t populated with offensive or inappropriate content. Both in his post and in his discussions, he mulled over a referendum-based system where people would get to set their own standards of what is appropriate — and if they didn’t choose for themselves, they would be shown posts that fit some sort of localized standard. It won’t be ready anytime soon, he said, but when it launches, “it will make this one of the largest, probably the largest, democratic participation collective decision making systems in the world.” In effect, Facebook might be striving to build a better governance system than actual governments.
That made me wonder where Facebook might stand on censorship of posts — an issue very much part of the discussion about whether the company could ever launch in China, where it is currently banned. “The general philosophy is that we want everyone to be able to say as much as they can and have as little as possible get blocked,” he said, choosing not to address that country specifically. (My own experience in covering Google’s experience in China is that when it comes to things like political censorship, “following local laws” does not release a company from moral culpability, and both outsiders and insiders will chafe at such appeasement.)
Zuckerberg’s post is worth reading in full, both as a powerful and thoughtful individual’s attempt to grapple with a global “Winter is Coming” moment and as a corporate strategy meant to link a company’s ambitions to a wider social movement that it portrays as a global benefit for all humanity. In the final paragraph of the Lincoln speech Zuckerberg cites, the 16th president concluded: “We…cannot escape history…The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation.” With this expansion of Facebook’s strategy, in this “stormy present,” Zuckerberg is attempting to engage history directly, stepping outside purely corporate bounds to participate in an idealistic vision (in which, of course, Facebook would be at the center of this new social infrastructure).
“We have a role to play and I think we should do that,” he said. “My thesis is that there’s this infrastructure that needs to be built for our social and civilization to reach the next level and transcend the current tribalism we have. There’s no one whose job it is to go build this stuff, right? There’s going to have to be a number of folks who play a role in helping do this and we want to do the part we can.”
For the record, Facebook says that Mark Zuckerberg is not running for office.
