Alex Hardiman: belief

Transcript context

…Oh, my God. Before you move on, just what was that like? I don't know how one can describe that experience, but what do you think about when you think back to that time? I think about wartime product management, right? You're coming in, and I think there was ... What I appreciated about that time inside of Facebook was that there was just this incredible humility that was needed to really understand and first diagnose what was actually happening on the platform, and the approach to content on Facebook historically it was very binary. You basically had content from friends and family and then you had public contents. Public content could come from anywhere. It could come from a reputable news organization or it could come from my younger brother posting something and declaring it to be true. What we really tried to do very quickly was try to unpack the categories of public content to say that there actually is something that is factually accurate information, and that requires a certain craft from the journalistic trade. There are ways to really look at what is trusted information, how you make that a little bit more essential and visible to people on the platform, while then reducing things that are at best dubious or at worse truly misleading propaganda. It was really fascinating and really hard just because the platform hadn't been built to think about classification of coverage in that way. Let alone to have the right goals and responsibilities and incentives. There was just a ton of work to figure out how to make the platform far safer and far more informative after, I would say, a pretty intense election cycle. Yeah. I was going to ask you about this later, but I feel like you're drawn towards just crazy, wild and crazy center of the storm roles. I guess that one you didn't expect necessarily to become that. I imagine The New York Times has a lot of that, but maybe a quick question there. What have you learned about just living in a world of just constant chaos and stress and urgency, endless urgency?…

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