0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.
"We used to have a sense that if we could just do those things, then that would make a lot of the things in the world better by themselves," Zuckerberg told CNN Tech. "But now we realize that we need to do more too. It's important to give people a voice, to get a diversity of opinions out there, but on top of that, you also need to do this work of building common ground so that way we can all move forward together."The company even has a new mission statement: "To give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together."This marks the first time the company has overhauled its mission, which had previously been "to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected."Zuckerberg believes he has just the tool for the job: Facebook Groups, which are now used by a billion people.
The new emphasis on Groups is the culmination of months of public appearances and posts by Zuckerberg stressing the importance of community. He's been traveling around the U.S., professional photographer in tow, to meet people from every state. During a commencement speech at Harvard, Zuckerberg touched on hot-button topics like immigration and inequality.Despite the political tone of the events, Zuckerberg has said he's not running for office. He's sticking to making an impact with the world's most ubiquitous social media platform and its almost 2 billion users.Zuckerberg tends to phrase things Facebook does in terms of their benefit to humanity, not investors or the company's bottom line. Facebook, which has a market value of about $440 billion, has a responsibility to use its sizable resources to do positive things, he says, and that should naturally create value down the line."That's why it helps to have control of the company," he said. (Zuckerberg maintains the majority voting rights at Facebook.)
If you need a reminder that Facebook’s primary reason for existence is not to enlighten you, consider the fact that the company catalogues a huge amount of information about you.The behavior is not surprising—Zuckerberg claimed years ago that privacy was no longer a social norm—but the scale still astonishes. Last summer the Washington Post listed 98 of the data points that Facebook captures about its users. For example, by cross-referencing your behavior on Facebook with files maintained by third-party data brokers, the company gathers data on your income, your net worth, your home’s value, your lines of credit, whether you have donated to charity, whether you listen to the radio, and whether you buy over-the-counter allergy medicine. It does this so that it can give companies an unprecedented ability to post ads that are presumably likelier to appeal to you. (I asked Facebook whether anything has changed to make the Post’s report no longer accurate; the company had no comment.)
To our community,On our journey to connect the world, we often discuss products we're building and updates on our business. Today I want to focus on the most important question of all: are we building the world we all want?History is the story of how we've learned to come together in ever greater numbers -- from tribes to cities to nations. At each step, we built social infrastructure like communities, media and governments to empower us to achieve things we couldn't on our own.Today we are close to taking our next step. Our greatest opportunities are now global -- like spreading prosperity and freedom, promoting peace and understanding, lifting people out of poverty, and accelerating science. Our greatest challenges also need global responses -- like ending terrorism, fighting climate change, and preventing pandemics. Progress now requires humanity coming together not just as cities or nations, but also as a global community. This is especially important right now. Facebook stands for bringing us closer together and building a global community. When we began, this idea was not controversial. Every year, the world got more connected and this was seen as a positive trend. Yet now, across the world there are people left behind by globalization, and movements for withdrawing from global connection. There are questions about whether we can make a global community that works for everyone, and whether the path ahead is to connect more or reverse course.This is a time when many of us around the world are reflecting on how we can have the most positive impact. I am reminded of my favorite saying about technology: "We always overestimate what we can do in two years, and we underestimate what we can do in ten years." We may not have the power to create the world we want immediately, but we can all start working on the long term today. 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. For the past decade, Facebook has focused on connecting friends and families. With that foundation, 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.Bringing us all together as a global community is a project bigger than any one organization or company, but Facebook can help contribute to answering these five important questions: How do we help people build supportive communities that strengthen traditional institutions in a world where membership in these institutions is declining? How do we help people build a safe community that prevents harm, helps during crises and rebuilds afterwards in a world where anyone across the world can affect us?How do we help people build an informed community that exposes us to new ideas and builds common understanding in a world where every person has a voice?How do we help people build a civically-engaged community in a world where participation in voting sometimes includes less than half our population?How do we help people build an inclusive community that reflects our collective values and common humanity from local to global levels, spanning cultures, nations and regions in a world with few examples of global communities?My hope is that more of us will commit our energy to building the long term social infrastructure to bring humanity together. The answers to these questions won't all come from Facebook, but I believe we can play a role. Our job at Facebook is to help people make the greatest positive impact while mitigating areas where technology and social media can contribute to divisiveness and isolation. Facebook is a work in progress, and we are dedicated to learning and improving. We take our responsibility seriously, and today I want to talk about how we plan to do our part to build this global community.
Facebook Is Looking for Employees With National Security Clearanceshttps://bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-16/facebook-is-said-to-seek-staff-with-national-security-clearanceFacebook Inc. is looking to hire people who have national security clearances, a move the company thinks is necessary to prevent foreign powers from manipulating future elections through its social network, according to a person familiar with the matter.Workers with such clearance can access information classified by the U.S. government. Facebook plans to use these people -- and their ability to receive government information about potential threats -- to search more proactively for questionable social media campaigns ahead of elections, according to the person, who asked not to be identified because the information is sensitive. A Facebook spokesman declined to comment.More at link --> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-16/facebook-is-said-to-seek-staff-with-national-security-clearanceLast Edit by Palmerston
EG,How can you doubt that big data and the military industrial complex only want to keep our minds safe from the influence of the scary outside forces that want to hack our elections.Last Edit by Palmerston
. That was my poor attempt at sarcasm. Does not translate as well over the Internet.Last Edit by Palmerston
I wonder what brought on this public rebuke of Facebook and Google by one of the old guard of organized chaos.
