Facebook and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg knocked critics and the media, arguing that people online have enough autonomy to decide for themselves what to believe.
Meta announced in January that it would be ending its controversial fact-checking practices and lifting restrictions on speech to “restore free expression” across Facebook, Instagram and its platforms, admitting its current content moderation practices have “gone too far.”
The decision met swift backlash from groups who argue that social media needs a robust fact-checking and content moderation system to prevent misinformation or extreme ideology from going viral. Zuckerberg has faced critics who argue social media use is inherently harmful, criticizing “sensationalist” media coverage of social media’s impact during his appearance on Theo Von’s “This Past Weekend” podcast.
“There’s a version of history that says that individual people are very powerful and have a lot of kind of autonomy and ability to kind of go in the direction that they think is right,” Zuckerberg said. “And then there’s like all these other narratives where people try to kind of diminish peoples’ autonomy and authority.”
The Facebook founder suggested that if anybody is guilty of a misunderstanding, it is the media itself.
“I’m just like, I’ve always been a person who really kind of believes that people understand—people are smarter than people think, and I think in general are able to make good decisions for their lives, and when they do things that like the media or whatever thinks don’t make sense; it’s generally because the media doesn’t understand their life, not because the people are stupid,” he said.
Zuckerberg added, “If people are saying something that seems wrong, it’s not usually misinformation, it’s usually that you don’t understand what’s going on in that person’s life, and I just think that there’s like a certain kind of paternalism in some of the like mainstream narratives and some of the media narratives”
The Meta CEO did note there has been some change in the information landscape however, as “maybe some of those cultural or media elite people like are having a harder time predicting what’s gonna happen in the world. Maybe there’s a little more humility of like ‘Maybe we don’t understand all this.”
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Zuckerberg argued the best predictive metric to assess a system is whether people find it to be useful.
“If you’re building something that is useful for them, then they will use it,” he said, suggesting they will abandon it if other, better options become available.
The danger, Zuckerberg said, is when people’s choices are made for them.
“Whenever we adopt the attitude of, ‘Oh, we must know better than them because we’re the ones building technology,’ that’s when you lose,” he said. “If you have that attitude for long enough then you just, like, become a sh—y company, and you lose, and you lose, and you lose, and then you’re irrelevant.
Zuckerberg reiterated his belief that people are smart enough to make their own choices and “ultimately drive the direction that society goes in.”
