[ad_1]
About 38 minutes after a teleconference with reporters on Thursday, Mark Zuckerberg asked for more.
"I think we should probably answer a lot of other questions," said the general manager of Facebook, despite the fact that the call was to end a few minutes later.
The day after a New York inquiry Time questioned Zuckerberg's leadership – and accused the company of concealing information detrimental to the public – it was clear that he was pursuing a painstaking approach to crisis management: more transparency. Among the revelations, Facebook has hired an opposition research company that uses a right-wing news site to attack the "enemies" of its customers, and that the company had already tried to downplay the existence of the interference. Russian on the platform.
The call was originally designed to show how the company is changing its approach to content moderation. On Thursday, Facebook also released a report showing how much "bad content" (hate speech and intimidation to nudity and terrorist propaganda) was disappearing each quarter as it violated the terms of use of the platform. (The short answer: billions of items and growing.)
Zuckerberg has announced a host of related initiatives, such as Facebook's plan that remains to come to end the broadcast of sensational and provocative content that does not technically violate its terms. Perhaps the most important is the creation of an independent board of directors that will control the decisions made by society on "what's left and what's left" of the billions of messages that the 2 billion Facebook share each day. Zuckerberg also promised to start organizing quarterly calls to provide updates on the progress of this thorny effort – further proof that Facebook is hoping that greater openness will help solve its many problems.
But the majority of questions asked by the CEO did not relate to the planned program. Instead, he was pressed on issues raised in Time a survey, for example how and why Facebook ended up hiring a company called Definers, affiliated with a conservative news site called NTK Network, and reportedly disseminated negative information about rival technology companies to mitigate Facebook.
Zuckerberg said that he did not know before that Facebook had hired the firm. Instead, he said that he was reading the news with everyone (and then immediately cutting those links). Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer, also did not pee in the room, leaving appearances hindering the truth as the company was dealing with the fallout of evidence of Russian interference on the platform.
When asked if there was evidence that he was not exercising sufficient control over the company, Mr. Zuckerberg stated that he was not in control of the company. It was natural not to have sufficient knowledge of the activities of a company with tens of thousands of employees. "I just think it's part of the reality of running a business," he said. "I will not know what every person here does."
In an article also published Thursday, Facebook detailed what it considered inaccuracies in history. "I want to be very clear about one thing," Zuckerberg said during the call. "I have said over and over that we are too slow to spot Russian interference … and we have certainly stumbled along the way. But it is simply wrong to suggest that we did not want to know the truth or that we wanted to hide what we knew or that we tried to prevent the investigations. People have been working tirelessly for more than a year. "
In addition to being the CEO and founder, Zuckerberg is chairman of Facebook's board of directors and controls 60% of the voting shares. Answering the question of whether he was willing to give up some of that power, he said, as he had done before, that he still believed he was in the best position to run the business. He added that Sandberg was not going anywhere either, attributing much of the company's progress to the "big problems" she faced. And he rejected the idea that "board composition" needs to be rethought more broadly.
The limits of Zuckerberg's commitment to transparency have been laid bare, as he has been repeatedly asked if anyone would be fired for Facebook's shortcomings, particularly the fact that it's not going to happen. he had hired a company that, as the CEO said, is "not the kind of thing I want. Facebook associated with. "
"I have the impression of having answered this question several times," he said. "I'm not going, on this call, to go into specific personnel changes or things like that."
However, a few minutes later, he again stepped back when one of his employees tried to close the call. "There are a lot of good and important issues here," he said, staying for another half an hour, "so let's continue for a moment."
Source link
