Jimmy Wales: evaluation

Transcript context

…What would your management advice be for Facebook? Ohh, for Facebook. Management advice, I don’t know. I always say I’m a terrible manager, but if I were giving advice to Facebook, I think they’ve got a real hard problem. To be a little bit sympathetic for a moment — although I’ve been quite critical of Facebook in many ways — one of the things that we find easier at Wikipedia is that Wikipedia has never been a place that’s a wide-open free-speech forum. We don’t have to really deal with some very complicated edges around what advocacy is crossing lines that are just too offensive because, really, at Wikipedia, you’re not supposed to be advocating for any particular thing at all, except for how do we make Wikipedia better? How do we describe these ideas fairly? If you come into Wikipedia with some sort of an agenda, however mild, that’s probably not the right thing to do. For us, these kinds of things — we don’t say, “Oh yes, people should be allowed to say whatever they want.” “Oh, but what if it’s so offensive?” They have to deal with that. It’s really hard because the point of Facebook and Twitter is to just post whatever you think and your ideas, and therefore, you’re going to find some people who have completely horrific ideas. Given that they’ve got a very difficult problem, what I would say is, they need to really think harder about the model that they’re using for moderation, which I think doesn’t scale very well. Hiring people in sweatshop conditions to make content judgements or trying to get AI — which is not really ready to judge the nuances of human conversation — to do it, neither of those is scaling very well. None of those works very well, as opposed to what I think is really more important: put more power into the hands of the community. Now, what does that look like for Wikipedia? We know that. What does that look like for Facebook? That’s a hard problem. I don’t have a simple solution for them. The one thing about Facebook that I think is really, really interesting is, because of the structure of ownership of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg has probably one of the strongest CEO positions of any company. It would be very difficult for anybody to oust him as CEO. Therefore, he can make decisions that would be death to a CEO who has to really panic about quarterly results. He can say, “Look, I’m going to make some decisions that are going to reduce engagement on Facebook, but that are going to prevent a situation where the whole world thinks we’re destroying Western civilization. We’re going to maybe make half the money we were going to make, but in the long run, it’s good for shareholder value because we can demonstrate that if we carry on our current path, everybody’s starting to hate us, and that’s not good for business.” He could do that. He has the power to do that, and nobody could really fire him for that. That means, I say, hold him responsible in a way. dy’s starting to hate us, and that’s not good for business.” He could do that. He has the power to do that, and nobody could really fire him for that. That means, I say, hold him responsible in a way. I hold all CEOs responsible for doing morally right things, but it’s a little easier to understand if you’re at a company that says, “Look, if I know what we’re doing isn’t great for the world, but it’s not illegal, and if I stop doing it, I’m going to get fired because the shareholders will revolt.” Then, it’s like, “Yes, you’ve got a tough problem.” Mark — he doesn’t need any more money. He’s got plenty, and therefore, he is in a position where he could make decisions that are best for Facebook in the long run. I am not suggesting that he violate any fiduciary duties, but he could take a long view in a way that most CEOs, unfortunately, can’t.…

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