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"The [executive]" has a meaning and is not expressive, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent to the words "the words is" "
The quote is from Politics and the English Language and while George Orwell never made Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg his object of scorn-the original reads "writer" in place of "executive" -he would have been right to do so. More than any other company today, Facebook has a freakish inability to use words.
Facebook's penchant for verbal nonsense is neither new nor unique in a corporate world that loves self-interested spin. But today, which is driving a crisis of trust engulfing the Silicon Valley company. The failure of its executives, particularly co-founder Zuckerberg, to speak in plain, candid language during earnings calls and other appearances is a big reason that can not escape the moral quagmire that causes a plunge in its lofty stock price.
Want an example of Facebook's failure with words? Begin with Zuckerberg's weird insistence that he does not run a media company. Facebook has long operated a global broadcast channel with more viewers than any television station on the planet, and has gobbled much of the advertising revenue enjoyed by traditional media outlets. Yet in testifying before Congress in April, Zuckerberg again would not concede the obvious proposition that Facebook is a media company.
"I consider us to be a technology company," he told lawmakers on Capitol Hill. Many observers interpret the response to an inquiry to the role of the United States.
Such prevarications are akin to the CEO of a large energy company When we talk about a mbadive spill: "We're not an oil company." In Facebook's case, the company's own pollution in the form of fake news, troll armies, and conspiracy theories. At Facebook's scale, it's a mbadive sludge of toxic media. If Zuckerberg really hopes for clean it up, he can start by admitting he's in the media business
Another example of what Orwell called "debased language" is Facebook's invocation of "the community" to justify behavior that is abhorrent and wrong. Most recently, executives mutated about "community standards" in a limp defense of the world facebook allows Holocaust deniers or the noxious conspiracy site InfoWars to flourish on its platform
Zuckerberg himself has invoked "the community" over and over to explain -dragging. But as sociologist Zeynep Tufekci pointed out, Zuckerberg has failed to explain how the 2 billion people can use a Facebook page to learn more about what "community" means to the company, to little avail. A spokesman said Facebook develops guidelines "with the community in mind" and on the basis of "safety, equity, and voice." I asked the spokesperson to explain how a billion people can be "a community" and she simply referred me back to the guidelines.
The exchange underscored New York Times columnist Farhad Manjoo "All of this fails a basic test: It's not even coherent. It is a hodgepodge of declarations and exceptions and exceptions to the exceptions, "Manjoo wrote while describing Zuckerberg's verbal contortions about Holocaust deniers using the service.
The incoherence is frustrating but, worse, it's disempowering. When Zuckerberg defends Facebook's latest outrage in the name of the community, it puts you and me and the trolls and the hate-mongers and yes, the Holocaust deniers. No decent person wants to be part of such a community. Most people who share a community with others who share similar values with whom they choose to identify. To Zuckerberg, the word apparently means something else.
"Platforms like Facebook, which exist for the express purpose of 'creating community', 'turn out to be in the business of exploiting the communities' outside the business community, the Moldovan hacker community), "explains writer Carina Chocanoa. "They invite members to 'participate,' but not, in the end, to make decisions together; the largest rewards, and the greatest powers, stay private. "
If Zuckerberg wants to cling to the word" community, "he will make some hard decisions about who is part of that community and who is not. Such a decision should be made clear by law and ethics and not only in the words of the public, but also in the words of [Alex] Stamos, made this very point. Stamos attributed the name of the company to the world. "Stamos wrote in the letter, first published by BuzzFeed.
That clarity-of-words and thoughts-of what's needed from Zuckerberg if he wants to lift his company out of the moral muck. One way to start would be to jettison what Orwell called "lump [s] of verbal refuses" and speak to Facebook users in clear English.
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