(2017-02-16) Zuckerberg Manifesto Building Global Community

Mark Zuckerberg's Manifesto for Building Global Community through Facebook

• Today I want to focus on the most important question of all: are we building the world we all want?
• Today we are close to taking our next step. Our greatest opportunities are now global
• Progress now requires humanity coming together not just as cities or nations, but also as a global community.
• In times like these, the most important thing we at Facebook can do is develop the social infrastructure to give people the power to build a global community that works for all of us.
• our next focus will be developing the social infrastructure for community -- for supporting us, for keeping us safe, for informing us, for civic engagement, and for inclusion of all.
• Supportive Communities
• Our goal is to strengthen existing communities by helping us come together online as well as offline, as well as enabling us to form completely new communities, transcending physical location
• Safe Community
• prevents harm, helps during crises, and rebuilds afterwards
• Informed Community
• It is our responsibility to amplify the good effects and mitigate the bad
• show a range of perspectives, let people see where their views are on a spectrum and come to a conclusion on what they think is right.
• Civically-Engaged Community
• Inclusive Community

He removed a line about monitoring private messages from his Facebook manifesto

• Mark Zuckerberg's vision for AI was initially somewhat creepier than what he shared in his epic 6,000-word manifesto about the future of Facebook. In the post, Zuckerberg briefly touches on how artificial intelligence can be used to detect Terrorist Propaganda.
• In an earlier version of the missive, which was shared with a number of news outlets in advance of its publication on Facebook, Zuckerberg took the idea farther. The "long-term promise of AI," he wrote, is that it can be used used to "identify risks that nobody would have flagged at all, including terrorists planning attacks using private channels."

Ben Thompson is not thrilled

• In this brave new world, power comes not from production, not from distribution, but from controlling consumption: all markets will be demand-driven
• This is why I read Zuckerberg’s manifesto, Building a Global Community, with such alarm
• seemed to confirm that Facebook’s incentives were such that the company would never become overtly political
• first, Zuckerberg may be wrong; it’s just as plausible to argue that the ultimate end-state of the Internet Revolution is a devolution of power to smaller more responsive self-selected entities. And, even if Zuckerberg is right, is there anyone who believes that a private company run by an unaccountable all-powerful person that tracks your every move for the purpose of selling advertising is the best possible form said global governance should take?
• my discomfort arises from my strong belief that centralized power is both inefficient and dangerous
• Facebook is too dominant: its Network Effects are too strong, and its data on every user on the Internet too compelling to the advertisers other consumer-serving businesses need to be viable entities.
• as long as Facebook was governed by profit-maximization incentive, I was willing to tolerate the company’s unintended consequences
• That, though, is why for me this manifesto crosses the line: contra Spiderman, Facebook’s great power does not entail great responsibility; it ought to entail the refusal to apply it, no matter how altruistic the aims, and barring that, it is on the rest of us to act in opposition.
• To that end, Facebook should not be allowed to buy another network-based app; I would go further and make it prima facie anticompetitive (Monopoly) for one Social Network to buy another
• Secondly, all social networks should be required to enable social graph portability
• Third, serious attention should be given to Facebook’s data collection on individuals
• Moreover, my proposals are in line with Zuckerberg’s proclaimed goals: if the Facebook CEO truly wants to foster new kinds of communities, then he ought to unleash the force that can best build the tools those disparate communities might need. That, of course, is the market, and Facebook’s social graph is the key.
• Given this reality, why would Zuckerberg want to be President? He is not only the CEO of Facebook, he is the dominant shareholder as well, answerable to no one

Nicholas Carr doesn't want to be in Zuckerberg’s world

• I’m not sure there is any world that we all want, and if there is one, I’m not sure Mark Zuckerberg is the guy I’d appoint to define it
• The beliefs of the individuals in the community are the values of the community, and they are anything but common standards.
• Nastiness, envy, chauvinism, mistrust, distrust, anger, vanity, greed, enmity, hatred: for Zuckerberg, these aren’t features of the human condition; they are bugs in the network. Tension and conflict, then, become technical problems, amenable to technical solutions.
• Zuckerberg ends up back where he always ends up: with a batch of new hacks.
• Society is not a fluctuating arrangement of contending and at times noxious interests brought into a tenuous equilibrium through a difficult, ongoing process of negotiation and struggle. Society is itself a technology, a built thing that, correctly constructed, “works for all of us.”

Leonid Bershidsky sees this as Plans to Rewire Your Life. Be Afraid.

• Facebook actively created the silos by fine-tuning the algorithm that lies at its center -- the one that forms a user's news feed.
• he has created a powerful tool for populists
• But Zuckerberg should realize that by trying to shape how people use Facebook, he may be creating a monster.
• Zuckerberg casts Facebook as a global community that needs better policing, governance, nudging toward better social practices. He's willing to allow some democracy and "referendums," but the company will make the ultimate decision
• Zuckerberg doesn't want to correct this mistake and stop messing with what people see on the social network