Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
Fun fact about Mark Zuckerberg: Before he dropped out of Harvard to build his company, the Facebook, he was a psychology major. You know, I basically studied psychology and computer science. So all of the work that I do is sort of at the intersection of those things. What I care about is building technology to help people interact with each other. That was Zuckerberg in an interview earlier this year. And it captures just how optimistic he still is about shaping the way people communicate with each other in the digital future.
Even after his company has been accused of stoking misinformation, inciting violence, and polarizing the globe. I'm Shereen Ghaffari. And I'm Alex Heath. We're hosting Land of the Giants, a podcast about the biggest tech companies of our time. This season, Meta, formerly known as Facebook. It's a company in a particularly controversial and vulnerable moment. Zuckerberg is placing a multi-billion dollar bet towards an imagined metaverse future.
Meanwhile, the rest of us are still grappling with what he has already built. When I think about any kind of abuse, from my perspective, the philosophy should be the company should try to prevent the things that they have done that make those things worse, but not try to fix society itself. This season, we're going to talk to the executives steering Meta's biggest decisions.
we hope we can marry the best of letting people freely communicate and then figuring out how to do that while keeping people safe, you know, from the worst of the worst, I think is like, is the play we're running right now. And I hope it works because the alternatives are all,
much worse. The first thing to do on elections and on hate speech and on content moderation and on privacy is of course to look yourself in the mirror, ask yourself the difficult questions. What did we get wrong? What did we not anticipate? And correct that first thing. But second thing is then to have the conviction to push back
when the assertions and allegations just are kind of way beyond any reasonable sense of proportionality. And you'll hear from some of Meta's sharpest critics, its former employees. There is a system of incentives inside of Facebook, the company, and it incentivizes...
bad behavior from people who want to curry favor with authoritarian governments or demagogic media figures, or just, you know, do what's right for growth for the company in the short term. I was thinking about the fact that the two entities I had spent my career working for, the Republican Party and Facebook, for different reasons just looked very different than when I had first started working for them. What I was seeing was real. What I was seeing was unacceptable.
and that the only path forward was to get the public involved. We'll explore why Zuckerberg is taking the company in a bold direction and how Facebook's past will inform its future. Land of the Giants, the Facebook meta disruption. This season is sponsored by Klaviyo. From Recode, The Verge, and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Subscribe for free wherever you listen and get our first episode on Wednesday, July 13th.