Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Thinks He's Making the World a Better Place

In a recent interview, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated that he believes Facebook is helping to make the world a better place — even if it causes some damage.

Recode reports that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated in a recent interview that he believes that the social media giant is helping to make the world a better place even if it damages many of the people and institutions that are threatened by its growing power.

Journalist Casey Newton asked Zuckerberg: “You know that you run a very polarizing company. Some folks, I think, have maybe given up on the idea that Facebook can be a net positive in the world. So what is the case that you make to yourself every day that it is?”

Zuckerberg countered Newton with another question: ‘Do you believe, at some basic level, that if you empower individuals that that leads to more good?’

Zuckerberg expanded on his thoughts about Facebook:

But I think if you look at the grand arc here, what’s really happening is individuals are getting more power and more opportunity to create the lives and the jobs that they want. And to connect with people they want. And to connect to the ideas that they want and to share the ideas that they want. And I just think that that will lead to a better world. It will be different from the world that we had before. I think it will be more diverse, I think more different ideas and models will be able to exist. And I think it inevitably means that some of the people who kind of had control over that world in the past will lose it, and I could see why those folks will lament the direction that it’s going in.

But my concern is that we’re too frequently telling the negative sides of it, from the perspective of the institutions that may be not on on the winning side of these changes. Where I think the people who are on the winning side of these changes are individuals, you know, whether that’s the people who are going to use these tools and share how to connect to the people that want to have all kinds of new experiences. Or this whole new set of people in the creator economy who are now going to be able to participate in a whole new set of jobs that didn’t exist in the past, but allow fundamentally more creativity in the world.

So, I mean I’ve learned over the last several years not to be too pollyannish about this. There are real issues that need to be dealt with. But my own sense is that the narrative is a little too biased or maybe a lot too biased towards telling the negative side of the issues rather than all the value and opportunity that is being created.

Facebook as a platform does likely provide value to its 2.8 billion users. But Zuckerberg’s belief that Facebook stands for individual liberty and choice is questionable when the platform regularly censors blacklists those it disagrees with.