MARK ZUCKERBERG

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook co-founder sought to explain some of the company’s more complicated policy issues this week during an interview with podcast host and martial arts commentator Joe Rogan. 

During the podcast, which lasted nearly three hours, Zuckerberg spoke about the “trade offs” that come with trying to moderate a platform with billions of users, pages and posts. 

It’s not a responsibility Zuckerberg said he enjoys or set out to undertake, as chief executive officer of  Meta Platforms Inc., which owns Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger. The company tries to balance taking down as much bad content as possible while realizing that the more aggressive they are the more likely it means they will remove something by mistake, he said.

Those mistakes “suck”, Zuckerberg admitted. “It sucks, though I think in the same way that probably having to go through a criminal trial but being proven innocent sucks,” he added. 

Rogan asked Zuckerberg about Facebook’s handling of a potentially damaging news story about Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, just before the 2020 election. Facebook cut the article’s distribution by tweaking its algorithms, Zuckerberg said. The company did so because of warnings it had received from the FBI about Russian propaganda. The FBI told Facebook, “you should be on high alert” for a data dump from Russia, Zuckerberg said. “Depending on what side of the political spectrum, you either think we didn’t censor enough or censored it way too much,” he said. 

Zuckerberg went on Rogan’s podcast to help promote the metaverse, his vision for the future of the internet that includes a series of virtual worlds where people will work and play as digital avatars. Zuckerberg also spoke about Meta’s plans for augmented reality glasses, which he expects will eventually be a major way to interact with the metaverse. Last year Meta launched a pair of “smart glasses” with Ray-Ban, but those don’t yet have augmented reality technology. 

Settlement

Meta Platforms Inc. settled a long-running lawsuit that claimed Facebook illegally shared user data with the research firm Cambridge Analytica.

The preliminary settlement, disclosed in a court filing late Friday, follows the revelation last month that Zuckerberg would have to sit for as long as six hours of questioning by plaintiffs’ lawyers. Terms of the agreement weren’t disclosed.

Facebook users sued the company in 2018 after it was revealed that the UK research firm connected to Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign for president gained access to the data of as many as 87 million of the social media network’s subscribers.

ALSO READ: Facebook experiences strange bug on news feed which sends spamming posts on celebrity pages.

In hard-fought battles over pretrial information sharing, lawyers for the consumers have steadily gained leverage to pry into the company’s internal records to back up their claims that Facebook failed to safeguard their personal data. Facebook’s parent company could’ve been on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars had it lost the case.

The court filing last month also showed COO Sheryl Sandberg would have to testify. The depositions were scheduled to take place through September 20. 

In Friday’s filing lawyers for both sides asked the judge handling the lawsuit to pause it, to “facilitate the process of finalising a written settlement agreement” and presenting it to the court for preliminary approval.

Meta declined to comment on the settlement.

Facebook had argued it disclosed its practices in user agreements. It had also said that anyone sharing their information on a social network shouldn’t count on holding onto their privacy.

Source: News 24