Mark Zuckerberg: belief

Transcript context

…I mean, there's so many things that we've messed up that there are many criticisms that are legitimate, but if that was a year and a half mistake, I think, you know, one of the things I reflect on over the last like 10 years or so was, you know, the political environment just changed dramatically, right? It's like before 2016, there was not a month that went by, except for maybe this IPO period, where the sentiment about the company was anything but positive. And then after 2016, after the election, basically there was not a month for a while where the sentiment about the company was positive. And I think so much of this stuff is correctly understanding your place in the world and in history, and I think we talked about before how it's like. I think we understood that we are a technology company and that you have to be a technology company to build this kind of thing. I think we understood that we're not a social network company, we're a human connection company and that will take different forms over time. The political environment I think I didn't have much sophistication around and I think I just fundamentally misdiagnosed the problem. That there was this basic challenge and there were a lot of things I don't want to simplify this too much. I mean, there were a lot of things that we did wrong. There were some things that we did right, but I think one of the things that I look back on regret is, we accepted other people's view of some of the things that they were asserting that we were doing wrong or were responsible for. I don't actually think we were, and there were a lot of things we did mess up and we needed to fix up and we needed to fix. But that there's this view where, when you're a company and someone says that there's an issue, I think the right instinct is to take ownership for it, say okay, maybe it's not all our thing, but we're going to fully own this problem, we're going to take responsibility for it, we're going to fix it. But when it's a political problem, I actually think, a lot of the time sometimes there are people who are operating in good faith, who are identifying a problem that wants something to be fixed, and there are people who are just looking for someone to blame. And I think, to some degree, if you take responsibility for things because you think it's a corporate crisis, not a political crisis, and your view is like, okay, I'm going to take responsibility for all this stuff. People are basically blaming social media and the tech industry for all these different things in society. If we're saying, okay, we're going to really do our part to go fix this stuff, I know there were a bunch of people who just took that and were like, oh, you're taking responsibility for that, let me kick you for more stuff. And honestly, we should have been firmer and clearer about which of the things we actually felt like we had a part in and which ones we didn't. responsibility for that, let me kick you for more stuff. And honestly, we should have been firmer and clearer about which of the things we actually felt like we had a part in and which ones we didn't. And my guess is, if the IPO was a year and a half mistake, I think that the political miscalculation was a 20-year mistake and it started in 2016. And that we have been working super hard to fix a lot of issues and to figure out, kind of what the right tone is for navigating what is a very kind of fraught political dynamic across both the country and multiplied across all these places around the world. I think we've sort of found our footing on what the principles are, where we think we need to improve stuff, but where people make allegations about the impact of the tech industry or our company which are just not founded in any fact that I think we should push back on harder. I think it's going to take another 10 years or so for us to fully work through that cycle before our brand and all of that is back to the place that it maybe could have been if I hadn't messed that up in the first place. But look, in the grand scheme of things, 20 years isn't that bad either and we'll get through it and we'll come out stronger. But I do think that is one of the kind of more interesting critiques that I think people get, and we get critiques on both sides on that. There are people who don't think we've taken enough responsibility, but certainly there's one line of critique, which is, you know, you kind of bought into too much of the stuff that you shouldn't have and, yeah, it's going to take us a long time to dig out of that. Do you have a reasonable framework at this point for like okay, here's the stuff where I feel like we actually do want to take responsibility for it and here's the stuff where like, no, that's not our fault.…

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