5/22/22, 6:36 PM Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook’s future, fake news, and Russian mischief - Vox changing, and I think people can lose sight of how closely tied that can be to local news. In a town with a strong local newspaper, people are much more informed; they’re much more likely to be civically active. On Facebook, we’ve taken steps to show more local news to people. We’re also working with them specifically, creating funds to support them and working on both subscriptions and ads that should hopefully create a more thriving ecosystem. Ezra Klein I’ve been thinking a lot, in preparing for this interview, about the 2017 manifesto where you said you wanted Facebook to help humankind take its next step. You wrote that “progress now requires humanity coming together, not just as cities or nations, but also as a global community,” and suggested that Facebook could be the social infrastructure for that evolution. In retrospect, I think a key question here has become whether creating infrastructure where all the tensions of countries and ethnicities and regions and ideologies can more easily collide into each other will actually help us become that global community or whether it will further tear us apart. Has your thinking on that changed at all? Mark Zuckerberg Sure. I think over the last few years, the political reality has been that there’s a lot of people feeling left behind. And there’s been a big rise of isolationism and nationalism that I think threatens the global cooperation that will be required to solve some of the bigger issues, like maintaining peace, addressing climate change, eventually collaborating a lot in accelerating science and curing diseases and eliminating poverty. So this is a huge part of our mission. One of the things I found heartening is if you ask millennials what they identify the most with, it’s not their nationality or even their ethnicity. The plurality identifies as a citizen of the world. And that, I think, reflects the values of where we need to go in order to solve some of these bigger questions. So now the question is how do you do that? I think it’s clear that just helping people connect by itself isn’t always positive. A much bigger part of the focus for me now is making sure that as we’re connecting people, we are helping to build bonds and bring people closer together, rather than just focused on the mechanics of the connection and the infrastructure. There’s a number of different pieces that you need to do here. I think civic society basically starts bottom-up. You need to have well-functioning groups and communities. We’re very focused on that. You need a well-informed citizenry, so we’re very focused on the quality of journalism, that everyone has a voice, and that people can get access to the content they need. That, I think, ends up being really important. Civic engagement, both being involved in elections and increasingly working to eliminate interference and different nation-states trying to interfere in each other’s elections, ends up being really important. And then I think part of what we need to do is work on some of the new types of governance questions that we started this conversation off with because there hasn’t been a community like this that has spanned so many different countries. So those are some of the things that I’m focused on. But right now a lot of people aren’t as focused on connecting the world or bringing countries closer together as maybe they were a few years back. And I still view that as an important part of our vision for where the world should go — that we do what we can to stay committed to that and hopefully can help the world move in that direction. https://www.vox.com/2018/4/2/17185052/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-interview-fake-news-bots-cambridge 12/16