Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently appeared on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast where he discussed the use of bots on Facebook, the concept of the Metaverse, and Facebook’s censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story.
The Independent reports that during a three-hour interview on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, Facebook (now known as Meta) CEO Mark Zuckerberg discussed a number of topics including the potential of the online Metaverse, his favorite hobbies, the use of bots on the platform, and Hunder Biden’s laptop.
Joe Rogan (screenshot)
Notably, Zuckerberg discussed how despite creating one of the largest social media platforms in the world, he personally doesn’t spend much time on social media, particularly Twitter, although he does enjoy Instagram.
“I find that it’s hard to spend a lot of time on Twitter without getting too upset,” Zuckerberg told host Joe Rogan. “On the flip side, I think Instagram is a super positive space. I think some of the critiques we get there is that it’s very curated and potentially, in some ways, overly positive… It’s easy to spend time there, and kind of absorb a lot of the positivity.” Despite Zuckerberg’s rosy outlook on Instagram, his company’s own research demonstrates that the platform is terrible for teen girls.
Discussing the future of the online Metaverse and virtual reality, Zuckerberg said: “Imagine if you didn’t have to move to some city that didn’t have your values in order to be able to get all the economic opportunities, that would be awesome.”
He continued: “So in the future where you can use AR, VR, and teleport in the morning to the office and show up as a hologram, I think that’s going to be pretty sweet, right? It will unlock a lot of economic opportunity, for a lot of people.”
Discussing how Facebook uses bots to moderate its platform, Zuckerberg said: “You could either build a system and be overly aggressive, capture a higher percentage of the bad guys, but also take out some number of good guys by accident. Or you could be a little more lenient and say the cost of taking out any number of good guys is too high, so we are going to tolerate having just a little bit more bad guys on the system. These are values questions.”
Zuckerberg also revealed that the FBI warned Facebook of an imminent “dump” of “Russian propaganda” shortly before the Hunter Biden laptop story went public.
Zuckerber said: “The FBI, I think basically came to us — some folks on our team and was like, ‘Hey, um, just so you know, like, you should be on high alert. There was the — we thought that there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election. We have it on notice that basically there’s about to be some kind of dump of — that’s similar to that. So just be vigilant.’”
After the laptop story went live, Twitter immediately shut it down while Facebook just reduced its distribution so it appeared in fewer peoples’ newsfeeds. “We just kind of thought, Hey look, if the FBI, which, you know, I still view as a legitimate institution in this country, it’s a very professional law enforcement,” Zuckerberg told Rogan. “They come to us and tell us that we need to be on guard about something. Then I wanna take that seriously.”
When questioned by Rogan, Zuckerberg admitted that the story was not Russian propaganda and appeared to be factual. Zuckerberg said: “Yeah. I mean, it sucks. I mean, it turned out after the fact, I mean the fact-checkers looked into it, no one was able to say it was false, right. So basically it had this period where it was getting less distribution.”
Read more at the Independent here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan
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