Thread by @MikeIsaac

Zuckerberg at Georgetown, streamed here:

facebook.com/zuck

folo me for pithy commentary

Zuckerberg starts speech acknowledging the death of Rep elijah cummings

fwiw Georgetown's Gaston Hall, where Zuckerberg is delivering his address, is the place where heads of state have made similar speeches in the past

from Barack Obama to Bono

bono being the prime minister of tunes

Zuckerberg making very intentional nods to social justice movements — Black Lives Matter, Me Too — and historical figures — Frederick Douglass, MLK

crystal clear he's positioning this speech as a moment in *history* — or at least in Facebook history

now allusions to WWI, Eugene Debs, Vietnam

this is supposed to sound big, sweeping, intentional

also the first time he's really spelled out his stance on "giving everyone a voice" beyond just that phrase

Zuck calling Facebook and social platforms "the Fifth Estate" is going to stick

heres me

actually this is me

Facebook's current security budget > entire revenue of FB at time of its 2012 IPO

35,000 people working on it

this is still kind of a headfake — billions of pieces of content shared on FB every single day, and at FB scale 35k people is like a finger in a dam

to me, this speech fundamentally amounts to an optimist's defense of the internet

(or the internet as defined by FB)

someones phone just went off

that student is now expelled

Zuckerberg says he's considered killing political ads, since they are a negligible amount of FB's Biz. but says decided against it b/c he considers political ads part of "voice," and that it's a slippery slope on what should be considered a political ad vs issue

this china stuff is important. Zuckerberg is saying — without *explicitly saying* — that Facebook has at least for now given up on entering China.

a HUGE reversal from basically most of FB's entire history. also a stark reversal on this toll from 2016
nytimes.com/2016/11/22/tec…

Zuckerberg basically yelling at this point

again, Zuckerberg tacitly calls for regulation of his company

— i can see why this makes sense strategically b/c it shifts the burden onto the govt rather than making facebook responsible for what "should and shouldn't" be on FB

(not sure other techco's are happy abt it...)

lmao

@Georgetown and @facebook cutting off the livestream right as the Q&A portion starts is weak as hell

@Georgetown @facebook oh, okay so here's the livestream — they just took it down from mark's page, but it's still up on Georgetown page

facebook.com/georgetownuniv…

@Georgetown @facebook ah crud. Gtown vetted the questions and prepared them in the past so we wont have the "kid stands up and does their own question on camera"

laaaaaame