Thread by @b_fung

Mark Zuckerberg is onstage with Cass Sunstein at Aspen Ideas. Sunstein jokes: “I think our topic is 'the future of the world.’ “ Which is funny, but also kind of unconsciously speaks to how central Facebook has become to the future of the world…?

Zuck is again trying to position himself as the Reasonable Adult in the Room by calling for government regulation and saying “I really don’t think as a society we want private companies” to be making big decisions about policy by themselves.

Zuckerberg commends the Honest Ads Act, says it’s a “good floor for what should be passed."

The definition of election advertising needs to change, Zuckerberg says, from being focused on candidates/elections to include specific issues.

(Though hasn’t issue advertising long been considered a form of political advertising?)

Zuckerberg is criticizing the USG for not punishing Russia for election interference.

“We can defend as best we can but our government is the one that has tools to apply pressure to russia, not us"

“There is a question whether these deepfakes are a completely different category of thing from normal, false statements overall, and I think there's a very good case that they are."

Zuckerberg concedes that the Pelosi video was “an execution mistake on our side” in that it took a long time for Facebook’s systems to flag it and rate it as false.

Zuckerberg pushes back against Chris Hughes’ call for a Facebook breakup, saying breaking up Facebook into smaller companies wouldn’t solve issues like misinformation. He points to YouTube and reddit, which he says are smaller yet still face some of the same challenges.

He says the prospect of a breakup “feels nice” but "we want to make sure the things we do actually address the problems."

Zuckerberg pushes back on the idea that WhatsApp and Instagram would have been more innovative had they stayed independent, arguing Facebook added lots of features that they wouldn’t have adopted otherwise.

Zuckerberg claims you can’t prove the counterfactual that they would’ve been more innovative on their own. But similarly, it seems like a stretch to claim with confidence that they couldn’t have been innovative.

It strikes me that Zuckerberg talks about the WhatsApp and Instagram purchases as “Instagram joined us” and "when WhatsApp joined,” which sort of sounds vaguely euphemistic

Zuckerberg also speaks of appeals processes and review boards as a form of online “checks and balances,” as though he’s in the middle of a comparative government seminar. Really underscores the idea that Facebook is big enough to be its own country, in a lot of ways.