5/22/22, 6:36 PM Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook’s future, fake news, and Russian mischief - Vox No, we actually got rid of that. Ezra Klein Well, see, there you go. Shows what I know. Mark Zuckerberg But keep going. Ezra Klein The broader point I want to make is that you don’t need to only serve rich people to diversify away from just being about attention. And when it is about attention, when it is about advertising, when you need to show growth to Wall Street, that does pull you toward getting more and more and more of people’s attention over time. I did an interview with Tristan Harris, who’s been a critic of Facebook. And we were talking about your announcement that some of the changes you’re making have brought down, a little bit, the amount of time people are spending on the platform. And he made the point, “You know that’s great. But he couldn’t do that by 50 percent. Wall Street would freak out; his board would freak out.” There are costs to this model, and I do wonder how you think about at least protecting yourself against some of them dominating in the long run. Mark Zuckerberg Well, I think our responsibility here is to make sure that the time people spend on Facebook is time well spent. We don’t have teams who have, as their primary goal, making it so people spend more time. The way I design the goals for the teams is that you try to build the best experience you can. I don’t think it’s really right to assume that people spending time on a service is bad. But at the same time, I also think maximizing the time that people spend is not really the goal either. In the last year, we’ve done a lot of research into what drives well-being for people. And what uses of social networks are correlated with happiness and long-term measures of health and all the measures of well-being that you’d expect, and what areas are not as positive. And the thing we’ve found is that you can break Facebook and social media use into two categories. One is where people are connecting and building relationships, even if it’s subtle, even if it’s just I post a photo and someone I haven’t talked to in a while comments. That person is reminding me that they care about me. The other part of the use is basically content consumption. So that’s watching videos, reading news, passively consuming content in a way where you’re not actually interacting with anyone or building a relationship. And what we find is that the things that are about interacting with people and building relationships end up being correlated with all of the measures of longterm well-being that you’d expect, whereas the things that are primarily just about content consumption, even if they’re informative or entertaining and people say they like them, are not as correlated with long-term measures of well-being. So this is another shift we’ve made in News Feed and our systems this year. We’re prioritizing showing more content from your friends and family first, so that way you’ll be more likely to have interactions that are meaningful to you and that more of the time you’re spending is building those relationships. That change actually took time spent down a little bit. That was part of what I was talking about on that earnings call. But over the long term, even if time spent goes down, if people are spending more time on Facebook actually building relationships with people they care https://www.vox.com/2018/4/2/17185052/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-interview-fake-news-bots-cambridge 10/16