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Reuters: Facebook Inc Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg laid out a vision on Thursday of his company serving as a bulwark against rising isolationism, writing in a letter to users that the company’s platform could be the “social infrastructure” for the globe.
In a 5,700-word manifesto, Zuckerberg, founder of the world’s largest social network, quoted Abraham Lincoln, the US president during the country’s 19th century Civil War known for his eloquence, and offered a philosophical sweep that was unusual for a business magnate.
Zuckerberg’s comments come at a time when many people and nations around the world are taking an increasingly inward view. US President Donald Trump pledged to put “America first” in his inaugural address in January. That followed Britain’s decision last June to exit the European Union.
“Across the world there are people left behind by globalisation, and movements for withdrawing from global connection,” Zuckerberg wrote, without naming specific movements.
The question, the 32-year-old executive said, was whether “the path ahead is to connect more or reverse course,” adding that he stands for bringing people together.
Quoting from a letter Lincoln wrote to Congress in the depths of the Civil War, he wrote to Facebook’s 1.9 billion users: “The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present.”
Zuckerberg said that Facebook could move far beyond its roots as a network for friends and families to communicate, suggesting that it can play a role in five areas, all of which he referred to as “communities,” ranging from strengthening traditional institutions, to providing help during and after crises, to boosting civic engagement.
In comments on Facebook, some users praised Zuckerberg’s note for staying positive, while others declared “globalism” dead.
Facebook has been under pressure to more closely police hoaxes, fake news and other controversial content, although the concerns have had little impact on its finances. The company reported 2016 revenue of $27.6 billion, up 54 percent from a year earlier.
One area where Zuckerberg wrote that Facebook would do better would be suggesting “meaningful communities.” Some 100 million users are members of groups that are “very meaningful” to them, he wrote, representing only about 5 percent of users.
Facebook is also using artificial intelligence more to flag photos and videos that need human review, Zuckerberg wrote. One-third of all reports to Facebook’s review team are generated by artificial intelligence, he wrote.Zuckerberg’s letter was “a bit more ambitious and a bit more of the 30,000-foot view than I see from most tech company CEOs,” Peter Micek, global policy and legal counsel at Access Now, an international digital rights group, said in a phone interview.
But Zuckerberg stayed away from certain subjects on which Facebook could be vulnerable to criticism, mentioning the word “privacy” only once, Micek said.
Reuters: Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg last week returned to Harvard University, the school he dropped out of to start the pioneering social network, to urge its graduating class to help create a new social safety net to allow creative risk-taking.
The 33-year-old tech founder of the world’s largest social networking company said he would never have been able to risk leaving the elite Ivy League school if he had not known that his family would have been able to support him if he failed.
“There is something wrong with our system when I can leave here and make billions of dollars in ten years when millions of students can’t afford to pay off their loans, let alone start a business,” Zuckerberg told the crowd on a cold, drizzly day when graduates’ dark academic robes stood in contrast to the brightly coloured plastic rain ponchos scattered through the audience.
“When you don’t have the freedom to take your idea and turn it into a historic enterprise we all lose,” said Zuckerberg, who was also named an honorary doctor of laws.
He offered no specific solutions to the problems he highlighted, but urged graduates to contemplate them.Since its launch in 2004, Facebook has inspired a host of competitors, including Twitter Inc and Snapchat.
Today some 1.9 billion people use Facebook each month. Its broad reach has made the company a lightning rod for controversy, most recently for the ways that producers of fake news stories used it to influence public opinion during the 2016 US presidential election, and for a pair of incidents last month in which users posted videos of two murders, one of them live.
The Menlo Park, California-based company has vowed to tackle both problems and this month said it would hire 3,000 new workers to speed up the removal of videos depicting murder, suicide and other violent acts.
Earlier in the day the website of the school’s student newspaper, The Crimson, was briefly filled with satirical headlines about Zuckerberg. The newspaper on Twitter apologised to its readers for the incident.
Zuckerberg’s speech was not the first time a successful dropout returned to the campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to address graduates.
Microsoft Corp co-founder Bill Gates spoke to graduates in 2007, shortly after saying that he would step away from his day-to-day role with the world’s largest software company to focus his time on philanthropy.
