Brief analysis of Facebook's public Q&A

I finally managed, about 2 weeks after publication, to watch the entire public Q&A that Mark Zuckerberg broadcast live from his Facebook profile to respond to the audio recording published anonymously by an intern which filmed Zuckerberg while expressing, with somewhat ‘loose’ tones, his disappointment with Senator Elizabeth Warren’s proposal to ‘break up Big Tech’.

Although many of the activities of US politicians are on Twitter, a Facebook employee, with a direct question to the CEO, points out that in reality Warren, in addition to other politicians who harshly criticize Facebook’s position as a monopolist platform, use Facebook itself to do their own propaganda and to communicate with their audience.

So what are they doing on Facebook, if they think it is a poorly regulated and risky terrain?

I don’t want to defend Facebook vigorously, much less Zuckerberg, who knows well that ‘with great power comes great responsibility’. As I was discussing yesterday in the latest email of my newsletter ‘This week in three words’ (subscription link at the end of the article), Facebook has problems that other Big Techs don’t have, because it directly influences people’s culture. Not being aware of it until the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook had to set up a rehabilitation program, which however seems not to be enough.

From the Q&A, which can still be planned in advance, it turns out however that the values on which decisions taken by Zuck and the Facebook board are based are coherent.

The live starts, in fact, precisely with Zuckerberg talking about the published recording, adding

“When the audio was published, we thought about what we had to do. Then we told ourselves that actually the things I had said, that we had said, we really think them. So this, today, is the opportunity to show the world what we think.”

They talk about encrypted conversations, the cultural implications that this technology entails, climate change, but also banal new minor features integrated into Facebook Messenger. All other offices around the world are also connected live (the broadcast takes place from the headquarters in Silicon Valley).

Employee stories who have gone through particular challenges are shared, and in the end a video from the Community Voices from Facebook initiative is shared, which aims to collect stories where Facebook, Instagram or Whatsapp play a significant role.

You can watch the entire Q&A, directly from Facebook, down here.