Thread by @andrestaltz

Decoding Zuck's doublespeak

A thread in which I try to interpret his new year's resolution for 2019 ( facebook.com/zuck/posts/101… )

First I was surprised how nice Zuck seemed and willing to ask good questions. Then I looked carefully and saw the strategic public relations stunt they were pulling off, like in the previous years' resolutions.

Given all that we know about FB's public relation tactics, historical records, leaks, statements from ex-execs and ex-investors, I know this is not a naive post. Specially after 2018, when they took the largest hit in the market.

The beef of the post are the questions posed. These are actually not questions. They are answers. Their strategy seemed to be:

(1) Fabricate the answer in the form of an "either or" question

(2) Make the reader feel they know the answer

(3) Make the reader feel like they discovered the answer on their own

(4) Make Zuck look like he doesn't know the answer

(5) Make the reader feel satisfied when Zuck later this year "discovers the right answer", which was all along what you were programmed to think

QUESTION # 1

> Do we want technology to keep giving more people a voice, or will traditional gatekeepers control what ideas can be expressed?

Option 1 is verbatim their company slogan, and is the answer they want to inject. It is very difficult for people to disagree with this statement. "I want to stop giving people a voice!" is an opinion likely to be rejected by your friends.

Option 2 has some slightly pejorative terms: control, traditional, gatekeepers. This already rubs the reader with the wrong feelings. And I believe they're targeting the media, like NYT and Guardian who proudly and loudly published adversarial stories.

"Traditional" certainly does not apply to FB, which is ironical, because FB is factually a gatekeeper that controls what ideas can be expressed, it's just not a *traditional* gatekeeper.

They don't want people to acknowledge that FB is a gatekeeper controlling what ideas can be expressed, they want people to sympathize with the company building technology, a seemingly neutral tool and empowering medium.

QUESTION # 2

> Should we decentralize authority through encryption or other means to put more power in people's hands?

To mix things up a bit, they decided to put the correct answer on the right side this time.

Option 1 does not speak a language your typical 60 year old Facebook Daily Active User grandmother would understand, it has terms like "decentralize", "authority", "encryption".

Option 1 confused the shit out of the reader, the reader feels alarmed, alerted, about some kind of alien technology (is it even a tech? what the hell is it?) that may do things I have no control or familiarity with.

Option 2 is understandable. More. Power. In. People's. Hand. Well, why not? Sure that sounds like a good thing, I think everyone can agree with this option. Again, it's also Facebook's slogan.

QUESTION # 3

> In a world where many physical communities are weakening, what role can the internet play in strengthening our social fabric?

This is not a "A or B" question, it's just an open question, but a very interesting one. They took a *real* question people have in society, and twisted it to be another question we're actually *not* having.

Real question we are having:

'In a world where many communities are weakening, what role is the internet playing in our social fabric?'

Twisted question we are not having:

'In a world where many *physical* communities are weakening, what role can the internet play in *strengthening* our social fabric?'

Brilliant. The real issue, which has been a consistent topic in NYT/Guardian adversarial stories in 2018, is that Facebook is actually *tearing* our social fabric. That's also what some FB ex-exec said.

They took a topic you agree with, and phrased it in such a way that you still agree with it, but it's not *exactly* the same topic. Suddenly you agree with something new that wasn't there in your brain before.

Notice that the real question is less engaging in finding a progressive solution, it's just an analysis question. It's a "WTF just happened to society" question.

But the twisted question was pointing towards the solution: "the internet PLAYS a role in STRENGTHENING our social fabric" becoming implicitly true as the reader's attention is focused on something else: "WHAT is that role?"

It's like I ask you "You WANT to eat a fruit, WHICH fruit do you want?" and invariably a fruit pops in your mind. Voilà, I just got you to want some fruit.

And even though they used the subject "the internet" and not Facebook, it's not the first time FB dresses itself with the title "The Internet", sometimes explicitly like in internet.org ...

... or sometimes implicitly, through word-of-mouth of all their daily active users in Asia and Latin America who basically understand that "Internet" and "Facebook" are roughly the same thing.

The decoded message here is simply:

"Things are bad locally with national and regional societies, and Internet-or-Facebook can have a role in strengthening society and bringing the whole world together".

QUESTION # 4

> How do we build an internet that helps people come together to address the world's biggest problems that require global-scale collaboration?

This one builds on the previous. Now you know you should replace "internet" with "Facebook". It's actually recruiting people, they still need a lot of folks, specially AI talent as they fiercely compete with Google for that.

Now that you, clever reader, have figured out the answers before Zuck has (poor fellow, he's still going to spend the year having these public debates to discover what you found out just by reading his text), the question is "HOW can you help Facebook solve the world problems?"

QUESTION # 5

> How do we build technology that creates more jobs rather than just building AI to automate things people do?

Interesting that AI was brought up here, maybe it's connected to the previous question that was trying to hire people? But this one also is not an "OR" question, it's a "how" question, and I think it's posed as an ethical defense of AI.

It tells you that it's possible to build AI while simultaneously creating jobs, you just need to figure HOW.

Notice that he's not raising the question of how many jobs AI destroys versus how many jobs it creates, and whether the net effect is positive or negative.

That doesn't matter. As long as you have any non-zero creation of jobs, you can use that as excuse to defend that AI is good while simultaneously creates jobs.

The next questions feel a bit out of context, but still help to paint Zuck as a helpless person trying to figure out all these things.

It's still open how are those debates going to happen. Reddit AMA would be the most inclusive, but it'll likely be podcasts, interviews, etc.

Overall I'm amazed at how clever (and wicked) they are at programming thoughts. At scale.