5/22/22, 6:36 PM Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook’s future, fake news, and Russian mischief - Vox If you’re the New York Times and you’ve been around for a long time and you’re well-known, people trust you. If you’re somebody who wants to begin a media organization two months from now, people don’t know if they can trust you yet. If Facebook is the way people get their news, and the way Facebook ranks its News Feed is by privileging news people already trust, it’s going to be a lot harder for new organizations to break through. Mark Zuckerberg That’s an important point that we spend a lot of time thinking about. One of the great things about the internet and the services we’re trying to build, you’re giving everyone a voice. That’s so deep in our mission. We definitely think about that in all the changes that we’re making. I think it’s important to keep in mind that of all the strategies that I just laid out, they’re made up of many different actions, which each have relatively subtle effects. So the broadly trusted shift that I just mentioned, it changes how much something might be seen by, I don’t know, just call it in the range of maybe 20 percent. What we’re really trying to do is make it so that the content that people see is actually really meaningful to them. And one of the things I think we often get criticized for is, and incorrectly in this case, is people say, “Hey, you’re just ranking the system based on what people like and click on.” That’s actually not true. We moved past that many years back. There was this issue with clickbait, where there were a bunch of publications that would push content into Facebook, [and] people would click on them because they had sensational titles but then would not feel good about having read that content. So that was one of the first times that those basic metrics around clicks, likes, and comments on the content really stopped working to help us show the most meaningful content. The way that this works today, broadly, is we have panels of hundreds or thousands of people who come in and we show them all the content that their friends and pages who they follow have shared. And we ask them to rank it, and basically say, “What were the most meaningful things that you wish were at the top of feed?” And then we try to design algorithms that just map to what people are actually telling us is meaningful to them. Not what they click on, not what is going to make us the most revenue, but what people actually find meaningful and valuable. So when we’re making shifts — like the broadly trusted shift — the reason why we’re doing that is because it actually maps to what people are telling us they want at a deep level. Ezra Klein One of the things that has been coming up a lot in the conversation is whether the business model of monetizing user attention is what is letting in a lot of these problems. Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, gave an interview the other day and he was asked what he would do if he was in your shoes. He said, “I wouldn’t be in this situation,” and argued that Apple sells products to users, it doesn’t sell users to advertisers, and so it’s a sounder business model that doesn’t open itself to these problems. Do you think part of the problem here is the business model where attention ends up dominating above all else, and so anything that can engage has powerful value within the ecosystem? Mark Zuckerberg You know, I find that argument, that if you’re not paying that somehow we can’t care about you, to be extremely glib and not at all aligned with the truth. The reality here is that if you https://www.vox.com/2018/4/2/17185052/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-interview-fake-news-bots-cambridge 8/16