Name: Mark Zuckerberg Answers to Facebook's Moderation of Controversial Content
Uploaded: 2022-08-25T17:13:10.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Mark Zuckerberg Answers to Facebook's Moderation of Controversial Content' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-08-25. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Mark Zuckerberg Answers to Facebook's Moderation of Controversial Content' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-08-25. Transcript available.

the Joe Rogan experience when we take down something that that we're not
supposed to I mean that that is like I mean that's the worst I mean that's like
discern like how it like say like these Christian Facebook pages I don't know
how they found out that 19 of 20 were fake but if someone just says I am Bob
Smith and they post as Bob Smith and they have a photograph and they but
really what they're doing is trying to talk shit about Joe Biden and get people
to vote Republican in the midterms like how what how do you know whether
someone's really not like this is the big argument with Elon and Twitter
because
Elon asked Twitter like what percentage of your website is filled with bots and
they say 5% and he says I don't believe you I think it's higher and let's find
out how you've come to this conclusion yeah and you know they're I believe they
said that they just took a hundred random Twitter pages and looked at the
interaction and there's some sort of an algorithm they apply to it but how do
you
discern yeah so I mean I think estimating the overall prevalence is is one
thing
but I think that the question of you know looking at a page and is this page
authentic I think that there's a bunch of signals around that one of the things
that we try to do is for large pages we try to make sure that we know who the
admin of that page is we don't necessarily if you should be able to run an
anonymous page you don't necessarily need to out yourself and say who you are
running it but we want to make sure that we sort of have like an identity for
that
person on file so that way we know like at least behind the scenes that that
person is real for certain political things I think having a sense of what
country they're originating from I mean some of that you can do just by looking
at
where their server traffic comes from like as the IP address coming from
Romania or
you know is or because if it's like an ad in some other country's election then
you
know you probably want to make sure that that ad is is you know especially in
countries that have laws around that are like are coming from someone who's a
valid
citizen or like at least in that place so there's a bunch of I think I don't
want one
theme in my world view around this stuff when it gets to some of the stuff that
we
talked about before is like I don't think that this stuff is black and white or
that
you're ever going to have like a perfect AI system I think it's all trade-offs
all
the way down right and it's and and you could you could either you could build
a
system and you can either be overly aggressive and capture a higher percent of
the bad guys but then also by accident take out some number of good guys or you
could be a little more lenient and say okay no the cost of taking out any
number of
good guys is too high so we're gonna tolerate having you know just a little bit
more like more bad guys on the on the system these are values questions right
around what
do you value more and and those are those are super tricky questions and part
of what I've
struggled with around this is I didn't get into this to basically judge those
things I got into
this to design technology that helps people connect right it's like and and
like that I mean you could
probably tell when we spent the first hour talking about the metaverse and the
future of basically
building this whole technology roadmap to basically give people this realistic
sense of presence it's
like that's what I'm here to do right um so this whole thing that's like arbitrating
what is okay
and what is not I obviously have to be involved in that because this is at some
level you know I run
the company and um and I I can't just abdicate that but but I I also don't
think that as a matter
of governance you want all of that decision making vested in one individual so
I think one of the
things that you know our country and our government gets right is the
separation of powers so you know
one of the things that I tried to create is we created this oversight board it's
an independent board
with that basically we appointed people whose kind of paramount value is free
expression but they also
balance that with things like when is there going to be real harm to others um
in terms of safety
or privacy or other other human rights issues and and basically that board
people in our community
can appeal cases to when they think that we got it wrong and that board
actually gets to make the final
binding decision not us so in a way I actually think that that is a more
legitimate form of governance
than having just a team internally that makes these decisions or you know maybe
some of them go up to me
although I don't spend a ton of my time on on on this on a day-to-day basis but
like I think it's
generally good to have some kind of separation of powers where you're architecting
the governance so that way
you you have different stakeholders and different people who can make these
decisions and it's not
just like one private company that's making um decisions even about what just
happens on our
platform how do you guys handle things when they're a big news item that's
controversial
like there was a lot of attention on twitter during the election because of the
hunter biden laptop story
the new york post yeah so you guys censored that as well so we took a different
path than twitter um i mean
basically the background here is the fbi i think basically came to us some some
folks on our team and was like
hey um just so you know like you should be on high alert there was the we we
thought that there was a lot of
russian propaganda in the 2016 election we have it on notice that basically
there's about to be some
kind of dump of of um uh that's similar to that so just be vigilant so our
protocol is different from
twitter's what twitter did is they said you can't share this at all um we didn't
do that what we do is
we have um if something's reported to us as potentially um misinformation
important misinformation
we we also have this third party fact checking program because we don't want to
be deciding what's
true and false and for the i think it was five or seven days when it was
basically being um being
determined whether it was false um the distribution on facebook was decreased
but people were still allowed
to share it so you could still share it you could still consume it so i say the
distribution has
decreased it got shared how does that work it basically the ranking in newsfeed
was a little bit
less so fewer people saw it than would have otherwise so it definitely by what
percentage i don't know
off the top of my head but it's it's it's meaningful but i mean but basically a
um a lot of people
were still able to share it we got a lot of complaints that that was the case
um you know obviously
this is a hyper political issue so depending on what side of the political
spectrum you either think we
didn't censor it enough or censored it way too much but right but we weren't
sort of as black and white
about it as as twitter we just kind of thought hey look if the fbi which you
know i still view as a
legitimate institution in this country it's like very professional law
enforcement they come to us and
tell us that we need to be on guard about something then i want to take that
seriously did they
specifically say you need to be on guard about that story i i no i don't
remember if it was that
specifically but it was it basically fit the pattern when something like that
turns out to be real
is there regret for not having it evenly distributed and for throttling the
distribution of that story
what do you mean evenly distributed i mean evenly in that it's not suppressed
it's not yeah yeah yeah i
mean it's it sucks yeah yeah i mean because i mean it turned out after the fact
i mean the fact
checkers looked into it no one was able to say it was false right so so
basically it had this period
where it was getting less distribution um so yeah i mean i i but i think like i
i think it probably it
sucks though i think in the same way that probably having to go through like a
criminal trial but being
proven innocent in the end sucks like it still sucks to have have like that you
had to go through a
criminal trial but at the end you're free um so it's i i don't know if the
answer would have been
don't do anything or don't have any process i think the process was pretty
reasonable you know it's we
still let people share it but but obviously you don't want situations like that
but certainly much
more reasonable than twitter stance and it's probably also the case of armchair
quarterbacking
right or at least monday morning quarterbacking i should say because in the
moment you had reason
to believe based on the fbi talking to you that it wasn't real and that there
was going to be some
propaganda so what do you do yeah and then if you just let it get out there and
what if it changes
the election it turns out to be bullshit that's a real problem and i would
imagine that those kind
of decisions are the most difficult the decisions of like what is allowed and
what is not allowed yeah
yeah i mean what would you do in that situation i don't know what i would do i
would have to like
really thoroughly well first of all you're dealing with the new york post which
is one of the oldest
newspapers in the country so i would i would say uh i would want to talk to
someone uh from the new
york post and i would say how did you come up with this data like where where
are you getting the
information from how do you know whether or not this is correct and then you
have to make a decision
because they might have got duped it's it's very it's hard because everybody
wants to look at it after
the fact now that we know that the laptop was real and it was a legitimate
story and there is potential
corruption involved with him what we we think oh that should not have been
restricted that should not
have been banned from sharing on twitter right i think everybody agrees with
that even twitter agrees
that but the thing is then they didn't think that in the beginning they thought
it was fake
so what do they do like if something comes along and the republicans cook up
some scheme to make
it look like joe biden's a terrible person and they only do it so that they can
win the election but
it's really just propaganda what what are you supposed to do with that you're
supposed to not allow that
to be distributed so if they think that's the case it makes sense to me that
they would try to stop it
but i just don't think that they looked at it hard enough when the new york
post is talking about it
you know they're pretty smart about what they release and what they don't
release if they're do if
they're going over some data from a laptop and you could talk to a person but
again like this is just
one story like one individual story like how many of these pop up every day
especially in regards to
polarizing issues like climate change or covid or or you know foreign policy or
ukraine anytime there's
like a really controversial issue where some people think that it's imperative
that you take a very
specific stance and you can't have the other stance like that those moments on
social media those trouble a
lot of people because they don't know why certain things get censored or
certain things get promoted
yeah i i agree and it's like to be in your spot and i was one of the things
that i really wanted to talk
to you about is this because like to be in your spot must be insanely difficult
to have no matter
what decision you make you're going to have a giant chunk of people that are
upset at you and there
might be a right way to handle it but i don't know what the right way is well i
think the right way
is to establish principles for governance that try to be balanced and not have
the decision making too
centralized because i think that it's hard for people to to accept that like
some team at meta or
that i personally am making all these decisions and i think people should be
skeptical about any
so much concentration around that so that's why a lot of the innovation that i've
tried to push for
in governance is around things like establishing this oversight board so that
way you have people
who are luminaries around expression um from all over the world but also in in
the in the us
um you know i mean folks like michael mcconnell who's i mean he's a stanford
professor is like
just he was i i forget which um it was which republican president appointed him
but i mean he was
i think going to be considered for the supreme court at some point i mean he's
a very um very prominent
and and and kind of celebrated um free expression advocate and he helped me set
the thing up and i
think like setting up forms of governance around that are independent of us
that basically get the final say
on a bunch of these decisions um and that's that's a step in the right
direction i mean in the the hunter
biden case that you talked about before you know i don't want our company to
decide what's misinformation
and what's not so when we work with with third parties and basically let
different different
organizations do that now i mean then you have the question of are those
organizations biased or not
and that's that's a that's a very difficult question but at least we're not the
ones who are
basically sitting here deciding we're not the ministry of truth for the world
that's deciding whether
everything is true or not so i'd say um this is not a solved problem controversies
aren't going away
um you know i think that there's it is interesting that the u.s um is actually
more polarized than than
most other countries so i think sitting in the u.s that's easy to extrapolate
and say hey it probably
feels this way around the whole world um and from the social science research
that i've seen that's
not actually the case there's a bunch of countries where social media is just
as prominent but
polarization is either flat or has declined slightly so there's something kind
of different happening in
um but but for better or worse i mean it does seem like like like the the next
several years
do seem like they're set up to be quite polarized so i i tend to agree with you
there are going to be
a bunch of different decisions like this that that come up um because of the
scale of what we do
almost every major world event has some angle that's like the facebook or
instagram or whatsapp angle
about how the services are used in it so yeah i think just establishing as much
as possible
independent governance

Mark Zuckerberg Answers to Facebook's Moderation of Controversial Content

the Joe Rogan experience when we take down something that that we're not
supposed to I mean that that is like I mean that's the worst I mean that's like
discern like how it like say like these Christian Facebook pages I don't know
how they found out that 19 of 20 were fake but if someone just says I am Bob
Smith and they post as Bob Smith and they have a photograph and they but
really what they're doing is trying to talk shit about Joe Biden and get people
to vote Republican in the midterms like how what how do you know whether
someone's really not like this is the big argument with Elon and Twitter
because
Elon asked Twitter like what percentage of your website is filled with bots and
they say 5% and he says I don't believe you I think it's higher and let's find
out how you've come to this conclusion yeah and you know they're I believe they
said that they just took a hundred random Twitter pages and looked at the
interaction and there's some sort of an algorithm they apply to it but how do
you
discern yeah so I mean I think estimating the overall prevalence is is one
thing
but I think that the question of you know looking at a page and is this page
authentic I think that there's a bunch of signals around that one of the things
that we try to do is for large pages we try to make sure that we know who the
admin of that page is we don't necessarily if you should be able to run an
anonymous page you don't necessarily need to out yourself and say who you are
running it but we want to make sure that we sort of have like an identity for
that
person on file so that way we know like at least behind the scenes that that
person is real for certain political things I think having a sense of what
country they're originating from I mean some of that you can do just by looking
at
where their server traffic comes from like as the IP address coming from
Romania or
you know is or because if it's like an ad in some other country's election then
you
know you probably want to make sure that that ad is is you know especially in
countries that have laws around that are like are coming from someone who's a
valid
citizen or like at least in that place so there's a bunch of I think I don't
want one
theme in my world view around this stuff when it gets to some of the stuff that
we
talked about before is like I don't think that this stuff is black and white or
that
you're ever going to have like a perfect AI system I think it's all trade-offs
all
the way down right and it's and and you could you could either you could build
a
system and you can either be overly aggressive and capture a higher percent of
the bad guys but then also by accident take out some number of good guys or you
could be a little more lenient and say okay no the cost of taking out any
number of
good guys is too high so we're gonna tolerate having you know just a little bit
more like more bad guys on the on the system these are values questions right
around what
do you value more and and those are those are super tricky questions and part
of what I've
struggled with around this is I didn't get into this to basically judge those
things I got into
this to design technology that helps people connect right it's like and and
like that I mean you could
probably tell when we spent the first hour talking about the metaverse and the
future of basically
building this whole technology roadmap to basically give people this realistic
sense of presence it's
like that's what I'm here to do right um so this whole thing that's like arbitrating
what is okay
and what is not I obviously have to be involved in that because this is at some
level you know I run
the company and um and I I can't just abdicate that but but I I also don't
think that as a matter
of governance you want all of that decision making vested in one individual so
I think one of the
things that you know our country and our government gets right is the
separation of powers so you know
one of the things that I tried to create is we created this oversight board it's
an independent board
with that basically we appointed people whose kind of paramount value is free
expression but they also
balance that with things like when is there going to be real harm to others um
in terms of safety
or privacy or other other human rights issues and and basically that board
people in our community
can appeal cases to when they think that we got it wrong and that board
actually gets to make the final
binding decision not us so in a way I actually think that that is a more
legitimate form of governance
than having just a team internally that makes these decisions or you know maybe
some of them go up to me
although I don't spend a ton of my time on on on this on a day-to-day basis but
like I think it's
generally good to have some kind of separation of powers where you're architecting
the governance so that way
you you have different stakeholders and different people who can make these
decisions and it's not
just like one private company that's making um decisions even about what just
happens on our
platform how do you guys handle things when they're a big news item that's
controversial
like there was a lot of attention on twitter during the election because of the
hunter biden laptop story
the new york post yeah so you guys censored that as well so we took a different
path than twitter um i mean
basically the background here is the fbi i think basically came to us some some
folks on our team and was like
hey um just so you know like you should be on high alert there was the we we
thought that there was a lot of
russian propaganda in the 2016 election we have it on notice that basically
there's about to be some
kind of dump of of um uh that's similar to that so just be vigilant so our
protocol is different from
twitter's what twitter did is they said you can't share this at all um we didn't
do that what we do is
we have um if something's reported to us as potentially um misinformation
important misinformation
we we also have this third party fact checking program because we don't want to
be deciding what's
true and false and for the i think it was five or seven days when it was
basically being um being
determined whether it was false um the distribution on facebook was decreased
but people were still allowed
to share it so you could still share it you could still consume it so i say the
distribution has
decreased it got shared how does that work it basically the ranking in newsfeed
was a little bit
less so fewer people saw it than would have otherwise so it definitely by what
percentage i don't know
off the top of my head but it's it's it's meaningful but i mean but basically a
um a lot of people
were still able to share it we got a lot of complaints that that was the case
um you know obviously
this is a hyper political issue so depending on what side of the political
spectrum you either think we
didn't censor it enough or censored it way too much but right but we weren't
sort of as black and white
about it as as twitter we just kind of thought hey look if the fbi which you
know i still view as a
legitimate institution in this country it's like very professional law
enforcement they come to us and
tell us that we need to be on guard about something then i want to take that
seriously did they
specifically say you need to be on guard about that story i i no i don't
remember if it was that
specifically but it was it basically fit the pattern when something like that
turns out to be real
is there regret for not having it evenly distributed and for throttling the
distribution of that story
what do you mean evenly distributed i mean evenly in that it's not suppressed
it's not yeah yeah yeah i
mean it's it sucks yeah yeah i mean because i mean it turned out after the fact
i mean the fact
checkers looked into it no one was able to say it was false right so so
basically it had this period
where it was getting less distribution um so yeah i mean i i but i think like i
i think it probably it
sucks though i think in the same way that probably having to go through like a
criminal trial but being
proven innocent in the end sucks like it still sucks to have have like that you
had to go through a
criminal trial but at the end you're free um so it's i i don't know if the
answer would have been
don't do anything or don't have any process i think the process was pretty
reasonable you know it's we
still let people share it but but obviously you don't want situations like that
but certainly much
more reasonable than twitter stance and it's probably also the case of armchair
quarterbacking
right or at least monday morning quarterbacking i should say because in the
moment you had reason
to believe based on the fbi talking to you that it wasn't real and that there
was going to be some
propaganda so what do you do yeah and then if you just let it get out there and
what if it changes
the election it turns out to be bullshit that's a real problem and i would
imagine that those kind
of decisions are the most difficult the decisions of like what is allowed and
what is not allowed yeah
yeah i mean what would you do in that situation i don't know what i would do i
would have to like
really thoroughly well first of all you're dealing with the new york post which
is one of the oldest
newspapers in the country so i would i would say uh i would want to talk to
someone uh from the new
york post and i would say how did you come up with this data like where where
are you getting the
information from how do you know whether or not this is correct and then you
have to make a decision
because they might have got duped it's it's very it's hard because everybody
wants to look at it after
the fact now that we know that the laptop was real and it was a legitimate
story and there is potential
corruption involved with him what we we think oh that should not have been
restricted that should not
have been banned from sharing on twitter right i think everybody agrees with
that even twitter agrees
that but the thing is then they didn't think that in the beginning they thought
it was fake
so what do they do like if something comes along and the republicans cook up
some scheme to make
it look like joe biden's a terrible person and they only do it so that they can
win the election but
it's really just propaganda what what are you supposed to do with that you're
supposed to not allow that
to be distributed so if they think that's the case it makes sense to me that
they would try to stop it
but i just don't think that they looked at it hard enough when the new york
post is talking about it
you know they're pretty smart about what they release and what they don't
release if they're do if
they're going over some data from a laptop and you could talk to a person but
again like this is just
one story like one individual story like how many of these pop up every day
especially in regards to
polarizing issues like climate change or covid or or you know foreign policy or
ukraine anytime there's
like a really controversial issue where some people think that it's imperative
that you take a very
specific stance and you can't have the other stance like that those moments on
social media those trouble a
lot of people because they don't know why certain things get censored or
certain things get promoted
yeah i i agree and it's like to be in your spot and i was one of the things
that i really wanted to talk
to you about is this because like to be in your spot must be insanely difficult
to have no matter
what decision you make you're going to have a giant chunk of people that are
upset at you and there
might be a right way to handle it but i don't know what the right way is well i
think the right way
is to establish principles for governance that try to be balanced and not have
the decision making too
centralized because i think that it's hard for people to to accept that like
some team at meta or
that i personally am making all these decisions and i think people should be