<story><title>Statement from Mark Zuckerberg</title><url>https://www.facebook.com/login/web/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>wpietri</author><text>The person who mentions the banality of evil, dannykwells, has an excellent point.&lt;p&gt;But there&amp;#x27;s more at play here. I briefly worked on Twitter&amp;#x27;s anti-abuse engineering. Many of the people &lt;i&gt;on that team&lt;/i&gt; cared a lot about protecting people. I sure did. But we didn&amp;#x27;t have the necessary power to actually solve the problem.&lt;p&gt;The people who did have that power were senior execs. They might say that they cared. In their heart of hearts, perhaps they even did. But their behavior demonstrated that they cared about other things much more.&lt;p&gt;My boss&amp;#x27;s boss, for example, was an engineering leader who had a climber&amp;#x27;s resume: quickly advancing through positions of more and more power. In my view, he cared about that a great deal, and did not give a shit about the actual harm to users. As soon as he got the chance, he pushed out my boss, laid off the team&amp;#x27;s managers, me included, and scattered the people to the wind.&lt;p&gt;I presume the same was true about the senior execs. They were aware Twitter was causing harm to people. If they wanted to know the details, we had plenty of research and they could have ordered more. Did they care? Impossible to know. But what they focused on was growth and revenue. Abuse was a big deal internally only as long as it was a big deal in the press.</text></item><item><author>jedberg</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m having a hard time reconciling all this right now.  On the one hand, from the outside, I can see the actions that Facebook takes and they seem awfully guilty of what they are accused of.  But on the other hand, I personally know and have previously worked with some of the people who work on trust and safety, specifically for kids.  Good people who have kids of their own and who care about protecting people, especially children.&lt;p&gt;The best I can come up with is that Facebook is so big that the &amp;quot;evil&amp;quot; is an emergent property of all the different things that are happening.  It&amp;#x27;s so big no one can comprehend the big picture of it all, so while the individuals involved have good intentions with what they are working on, the sum total of all employees&amp;#x27; intentions ends up broken.&lt;p&gt;So maybe Zuck is telling the truth here, that they are trying to fix all this.  But no one can see the forrest from the trees.&lt;p&gt;I can&amp;#x27;t reconcile it any other way.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>whakim</author><text>I think this hits the nail on the head. It&amp;#x27;s not that Facebook or the many people who work there don&amp;#x27;t care about kids or a deleterious political climate. They do care. It&amp;#x27;s just about what happens when those concerns conflict with other concerns, such as maximizing user engagement. In my opinion Haugen&amp;#x27;s testimony and Zuckerberg&amp;#x27;s response simply confirm this: Haugen talks a lot about the research that was done and &lt;i&gt;how that research was ignored&lt;/i&gt;; Zuckerberg points out a lot of (somewhat lacking in context) facts about the size of Facebook&amp;#x27;s investments in trust and integrity or openness to regulation.</text></comment>
<story><title>Statement from Mark Zuckerberg</title><url>https://www.facebook.com/login/web/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>wpietri</author><text>The person who mentions the banality of evil, dannykwells, has an excellent point.&lt;p&gt;But there&amp;#x27;s more at play here. I briefly worked on Twitter&amp;#x27;s anti-abuse engineering. Many of the people &lt;i&gt;on that team&lt;/i&gt; cared a lot about protecting people. I sure did. But we didn&amp;#x27;t have the necessary power to actually solve the problem.&lt;p&gt;The people who did have that power were senior execs. They might say that they cared. In their heart of hearts, perhaps they even did. But their behavior demonstrated that they cared about other things much more.&lt;p&gt;My boss&amp;#x27;s boss, for example, was an engineering leader who had a climber&amp;#x27;s resume: quickly advancing through positions of more and more power. In my view, he cared about that a great deal, and did not give a shit about the actual harm to users. As soon as he got the chance, he pushed out my boss, laid off the team&amp;#x27;s managers, me included, and scattered the people to the wind.&lt;p&gt;I presume the same was true about the senior execs. They were aware Twitter was causing harm to people. If they wanted to know the details, we had plenty of research and they could have ordered more. Did they care? Impossible to know. But what they focused on was growth and revenue. Abuse was a big deal internally only as long as it was a big deal in the press.</text></item><item><author>jedberg</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m having a hard time reconciling all this right now.  On the one hand, from the outside, I can see the actions that Facebook takes and they seem awfully guilty of what they are accused of.  But on the other hand, I personally know and have previously worked with some of the people who work on trust and safety, specifically for kids.  Good people who have kids of their own and who care about protecting people, especially children.&lt;p&gt;The best I can come up with is that Facebook is so big that the &amp;quot;evil&amp;quot; is an emergent property of all the different things that are happening.  It&amp;#x27;s so big no one can comprehend the big picture of it all, so while the individuals involved have good intentions with what they are working on, the sum total of all employees&amp;#x27; intentions ends up broken.&lt;p&gt;So maybe Zuck is telling the truth here, that they are trying to fix all this.  But no one can see the forrest from the trees.&lt;p&gt;I can&amp;#x27;t reconcile it any other way.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kbenson</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t necessarily subscribe to the Gervais Principle[1] other than thinking it&amp;#x27;s an interesting lens through which to reexamine motives and motivations of coworkers, but sometimes the terminology is &lt;i&gt;damn apt&lt;/i&gt; (at least for one group...).&lt;p&gt;1: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.ribbonfarm.com&amp;#x2F;2009&amp;#x2F;10&amp;#x2F;07&amp;#x2F;the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.ribbonfarm.com&amp;#x2F;2009&amp;#x2F;10&amp;#x2F;07&amp;#x2F;the-gervais-principle-...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>