Thread by @amac

This is a worthwhile watch. Zuckerberg interviewed (not very confrontationally) by @zittrain who does a great job making the conversation useful, funny & interesting:

1/

Lots to unpack, incl this @finkd gem:
~"I think about [Facebook] as a decentralizing force … my generation got into tech because we believe tech gives individuals power & isn't massively centralizing, now you've built a bunch of big companies in the process but…"
2/

On encryption, @finkd seems focused (~25:20) on the tradeoff of FB being able to inform on people proactively through content monitoring rather than on being able to decrypt on govt request. That's ~interesting~?
(Though he later says he leans towards e2e for msging apps)
3/

@zittrain's response is classic:
"It's always trite to call something Orwellian, but [that] makes Orwell look like a piker"
4/

@Finkd says that in FB's attempt to find and ban fake accounts and other bad actors, behavioral, not content-based, analysis has been most useful (~30:10).
5/

@finkd "within whatever rules you set up, as content approaches the line, it gets more distribution … things that are as close to the line as bad get more distribution" Then talks about penalizing content that is does not violate the FB rules as a really impt tactic (~52:00)
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@zittrain asks about transparency on those cases, which @finkd says is a good idea but not what he's thinking about doing because of how the systems do ML.
7/

Interesting discussion around 1:05-1:10 where, at least for FB, @finkd articulates a strong belief in an EU-style non-market privacy right (though maybe it is a right only to choice).
"the notion of whether you can pay to have different privacy controls, feels wrong"
8/

Lots on the independent review board. Incl a bit about the difference between customer support and trust & safety which @finkd says is more like a court system and that he has 30K people working on (!) ~1:12
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Some words that might mean that the independent review board will get to review whether the policies themselves are the correct policies for FB in a way that @finkd wouldn't control (and then some words walking that back, at least at first) ~1:20.
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1:35:30 is good for lols as @finkd attempts to make the case that FB is a privacy "innovator" and that it's success is due to its pro-active privacy example. Yowza.
"Thinking about FB as an innovator in privacy is certainly not the mainstream view but…"
11/

@finkd's use of pronouns is also really interesting. He switches from "we" to "they" a bunch.
12/

Three takeaways,
1) @finkd thinks about this more than shows in hearings -- but less than academic experts (as you might expect)
2) FB is thinking a lot removing / suppressing / etc content that is legal and doesn't violate their content rules (paging @daphnehk)
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3) His future of FB prediction is that social networks will be reconstituted around the core of private and impermanent communications.
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