COSTRUIAMO LA COMUNITA’ GLOBALE
(18 Febbraio 2017)
Non c’è dubbio che la globalizzazione stia vivendo una fase di crisi: non tutte le sue promesse sono state
mantenute. In diversi Paesi occidentali il ceto medio si sente più povero, la stessa aristocrazia operaia che ha
dettato l’agenda politica per parecchi decenni sente sbriciolarsi sotto i suoi piedi il potere acquisito.
Conseguenza: nelle aree operaie, come il wisconsin o le Midlands inglesi vincono coloro che predicano un verbo
nazionalista che usa lo slogan “America first” o “Britain first”.
E’ accaduto nel 2016 negli stati Uniti con l’elezione di Donald Trump ed in Gran Bretagna con la vittoria del
“leave” nel referendum improvvidamente indetto da David Cameron sulla permanenza del Regno Unito nell’Unione
Europea.
Un mese fa, sia Donald Trump che Theresa May ci hanno spiegato in due discorsi pronunciati a pochi giorni di
distanza, perché la globalizzazione è negativa, Il 16 febbraio Mark Zuckerberg ha pubblicato su Facebook quello che
i giornali italiani hanno definito il suo “manifesto” in favore della globalizzazione: ho deciso di pubblicarlo non
perché contenga dei suggerimenti mirabolanti, buoni anche per noi che siamo immersi in un marasma politico
difficilmente decifrabile, ma perché mi pare comunque un segnale di reazione rispetto al trumpismo imperante.
Forse le cinquemila parole di Zuckerberg possono aiutarci a dissipare qualche nebbia ideologica e possono comunque
incoraggiarci a costruire una comunità globale che non costruisca muri ma getti dei ponti su cui gente di diversa
origine, colore, credo… possa incontrarsi e cooperare.
PLG
***
Building Global Community
On our journey to connect the world, we often discuss products we’re building and updates on our business. Today I
want to focus on the most important
question of all: are we building the world we all want?
History is the story of how we’ve learned to come together in ever greater numbers — from tribes to cities to
nations. At each step, we built social infrastructure
like communities, media and governments to empower us to achieve things we couldn’t on our own.
Today we are close to taking our next step. Our greatest opportunities are now global — like spreading prosperity
and freedom, promoting peace and understanding,
lifting people out of poverty, and accelerating science. Our greatest challenges also need global responses — like
ending terrorism, fighting climate
change, and preventing pandemics. Progress now requires humanity coming together not just as cities or nations, but
also as a global community.
This is especially important right now. Facebook stands for bringing us closer together and building a global
community. When we began, this idea was not
controversial. Every year, the world got more connected and this was seen as a positive trend. Yet now, across the
world there are people left behind by
globalization, and movements for withdrawing from global connection. There are questions about whether we can make
a global community that works for everyone,
and whether the path ahead is to connect more or reverse course.
This is a time when many of us around the world are reflecting on how we can have the most positive impact. I am
reminded of my favorite saying about technology:
“We always overestimate what we can do in two years, and we underestimate what we can do in ten years.” We may not
have the power to create the world we
want immediately, but we can all start working on the long term today. In times like these, the most important
thing we at Facebook can do is develop the
social infrastructure to give people the power to build a global community that works for all of us.
For the past decade, Facebook has focused on connecting friends and families. With that foundation, our next focus
will be developing the social infrastructure
for community — for supporting us, for keeping us safe, for informing us, for civic engagement, and for inclusion
of all.
Bringing us all together as a global community is a project bigger than any one organization or company, but
Facebook can help contribute to answering
these five important questions:
• How do we help people build supportive communities that strengthen traditional institutions in a world where
membership in these institutions is declining?
• How do we help people build a safe community that prevents harm, helps during crises and rebuilds afterwards in a
world where anyone across the world
can affect us?
• How do we help people build an informed community that exposes us to new ideas and builds common understanding in
a world where every person has a voice?
• How do we help people build a civically-engaged community in a world where participation in voting sometimes
includes less than half our population?
• How do we help people build an inclusive community that reflects our collective values and common humanity from
local to global levels, spanning cultures,
nations and regions in a world with few examples of global communities?
My hope is that more of us will commit our energy to building the long term social infrastructure to bring humanity
together. The answers to these questions
won’t all come from Facebook, but I believe we can play a role.
Our job at Facebook is to help people make the greatest positive impact while mitigating areas where technology and
social media can contribute to divisiveness
and isolation. Facebook is a work in progress, and we are dedicated to learning and improving. We take our
responsibility seriously, and today I want to
talk about how we plan to do our part to build this global community.
***
Supportive Communities
Building a global community that works for everyone starts with the millions of smaller communities and intimate
social structures we turn to for our personal,
emotional and spiritual needs.
Whether they’re churches, sports teams, unions or other local groups, they all share important roles as social
infrastructure for our communities. They
provide all of us with a sense of purpose and hope; moral validation that we are needed and part of something
bigger than ourselves; comfort that we are
not alone and a community is looking out for us; mentorship, guidance and personal development; a safety net;
values, cultural norms and accountability;
social gatherings, rituals and a way to meet new people; and a way to pass time.
In our society, we have personal relationships with friends and family, and then we have institutional
relationships with the governments that set the
rules. A healthy society also has many layers of communities between us and government that take care of our needs.
When we refer to our “social fabric”,
we usually mean the many mediating groups that bring us together and reinforce our values.
However, there has been a striking decline in the important social infrastructure of local communities over the
past few decades. Since the 1970s, membership
in some local groups has declined by as much as one-quarter, cutting across all segments of the population.
The decline raises deeper questions alongside surveys showing large percentages of our population lack a sense of
hope for the future. It is possible many
of our challenges are at least as much social as they are economic — related to a lack of community and connection
to something greater than ourselves.
As one pastor told me: “People feel unsettled. A lot of what was settling in the past doesn’t exist anymore.”
Online communities are a bright spot, and we can strengthen existing physical communities by helping people come
together online as well as offline. In
the same way connecting with friends online strengthens real relationships, developing this infrastructure will
strengthen these communities, as well as
enable completely new ones to form.
A woman named Christina was diagnosed with a rare disorder called Epidermolysis Bullosa — and now she’s a member
of a group that connects 2,400 people
around the world so none of them have to suffer alone. A man named Matt was raising his two sons by himself and he
started the Black Fathers group to help
men share advice and encouragement as they raise their families. In San Diego, more than 4,000 military family
members are part of a group that helps them
make friends with other spouses. These communities don’t just interact online. They hold get-togethers, organize
dinners, and support each other in their
daily lives.
We recently found that more than 100 million people on Facebook are members of what we call “very meaningful”
groups. These are groups that upon joining,
quickly become the most important part of our social network experience and an important part of our physical
support structure. For example, many new
parents tell us that joining a parenting group after having a child fits this purpose.
There is a real opportunity to connect more of us with groups that will be meaningful social infrastructure in our
lives. More than one billion people
are active members of Facebook groups, but most don’t seek out groups on their own — friends send invites or
Facebook suggests them. If we can improve
our suggestions and help connect one billion people with meaningful communities, that can strengthen our social
fabric.
Going forward, we will measure Facebook’s progress with groups based on meaningful groups, not groups overall. This
will require not only helping people
connect with existing meaningful groups, but also enabling community leaders to create more meaningful groups for
people to connect with.
The most successful physical communities have engaged leaders, and we’ve seen the same with online groups as well.
In Berlin, a man named Monis Bukhari
runs a group where he personally helps refugees find homes and jobs. Today, Facebook’s tools for group admins are
relatively simple. We plan to build more
tools to empower community leaders like Monis to run and grow their groups the way they’d like, similar to what
we’ve done with Pages.
Most communities are made of many sub-communities, and this is another clear area for developing new tools. A
school, for example, is not a single community,
but many smaller groups among its classes, dorms and student groups. Just as the social fabric of society is made
up of many communities, each community
is made of many groups of personal connections. We plan to expand groups to support sub-communities.
We can look at many activities through the lens of building community. Watching video of our favorite sports team
or TV show, reading our favorite newspaper,
or playing our favorite game are not just entertainment or information but a shared experience and opportunity to
bring together people who care about
the same things. We can design these experiences not for passive consumption but for strengthening social
connections.
Our goal is to strengthen existing communities by helping us come together online as well as offline, as well as
enabling us to form completely new communities,
transcending physical location. When we do this, beyond connecting online, we reinforce our physical communities by
bringing us together in person to support
each other.
A healthy society needs these communities to support our personal, emotional and spiritual needs. In a world where
this physical social infrastructure
has been declining, we have a real opportunity to help strengthen these communities and the social fabric of our
society.
***
Safe Community
As we build a global community, this is a moment of truth. Our success isn’t just based on whether we can capture
videos and share them with friends. It’s
about whether we’re building a community that helps keep us safe — that prevents harm, helps during crises, and
rebuilds afterwards.
Today’s threats are increasingly global, but the infrastructure to protect us is not. Problems like terrorism,
natural disasters, disease, refugee crises,
and climate change need coordinated responses from a worldwide vantage point. No nation can solve them alone. A
virus in one nation can quickly spread
to others. A conflict in one country can create a refugee crisis across continents. Pollution in one place can
affect the environment around the world.
Humanity’s current systems are insufficient to address these issues.
Many dedicated people join global non-profit organizations to help, but the market often fails to fund or
incentivize building the necessary infrastructure.
I have long expected more organizations and startups to build health and safety tools using technology, and I have
been surprised by how little of what
must be built has even been attempted. There is a real opportunity to build global safety infrastructure, and I
have directed Facebook to invest more and
more resources into serving this need.
For some of these problems, the Facebook community is in a unique position to help prevent harm, assist during a
crisis, or come together to rebuild afterwards.
This is because of the amount of communication across our network, our ability to quickly reach people worldwide in
an emergency, and the vast scale of
people’s intrinsic goodness aggregated across our community.
To prevent harm, we can build social infrastructure to help our community identify problems before they happen.
When someone is thinking of suicide or
hurting themselves, we’ve built infrastructure to give their friends and community tools that could save their
life. When a child goes missing, we’ve built
infrastructure to show Amber Alerts — and multiple children have been rescued without harm. And we’ve built
infrastructure to work with public safety
organizations around the world when we become aware of these issues. Going forward, there are even more cases where
our community should be able to identify
risks related to mental health, disease or crime.
To help during a crisis, we’ve built infrastructure like Safety Check so we can all let our friends know we’re safe
and check on friends who might be affected
by an attack or natural disaster. Safety Check has been activated almost 500 times in two years and has already
notified people that their families and
friends are safe more than a billion times. When there is a disaster, governments often call us to make sure Safety
Check has been activated in their countries.
But there is more to build. We recently added tools to find and offer shelter, food and other resources during
emergencies. Over time, our community should
be able to help during wars and ongoing issues that are not limited to a single event.
To rebuild after a crisis, we’ve built the world’s largest social infrastructure for collective action. A few years
ago, after an earthquake in Nepal,
the Facebook community raised $15 million to help people recover and rebuild — which was the largest crowdfunded
relief effort in history. We saw a similar
effort after the shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando when people across the country organized blood
donations to help victims they had never met.
Similarly, we built tools so millions of people could commit to becoming organ donors to save others after
accidents, and registries reported larger boosts
in sign ups than ever before.
Looking ahead, one of our greatest opportunities to keep people safe is building artificial intelligence to
understand more quickly and accurately what
is happening across our community.
There are billions of posts, comments and messages across our services each day, and since it’s impossible to
review all of them, we review content once
it is reported to us. There have been terribly tragic events — like suicides, some live streamed — that perhaps
could have been prevented if someone
had realized what was happening and reported them sooner. There are cases of bullying and harassment every day,
that our team must be alerted to before
we can help out. These stories show we must find a way to do more.
Artificial intelligence can help provide a better approach. We are researching systems that can look at photos and
videos to flag content our team should
review. This is still very early in development, but we have started to have it look at some content, and it
already generates about one-third of all reports
to the team that reviews content for our community.
It will take many years to fully develop these systems. Right now, we’re starting to explore ways to use AI to tell
the difference between news stories
about terrorism and actual terrorist propaganda so we can quickly remove anyone trying to use our services to
recruit for a terrorist organization. This
is technically difficult as it requires building AI that can read and understand news, but we need to work on this
to help fight terrorism worldwide.
As we discuss keeping our community safe, it is important to emphasize that part of keeping people safe is
protecting individual security and liberty.
We are strong advocates of encryption and have built it into the largest messaging platforms in the world —
WhatsApp and Messenger. Keeping our community
safe does not require compromising privacy. Since building end-to-end encryption into WhatsApp, we have reduced
spam and malicious content by more than
75%.
The path forward is to recognize that a global community needs social infrastructure to keep us safe from threats
around the world, and that our community
is uniquely positioned to prevent disasters, help during crises, and rebuild afterwards. Keeping the global
community safe is an important part of our
mission — and an important part of how we’ll measure our progress going forward.
***
Informed Community
The purpose of any community is to bring people together to do things we couldn’t do on our own. To do this, we
need ways to share new ideas and share
enough common understanding to actually work together.
Giving everyone a voice has historically been a very positive force for public discourse because it increases the
diversity of ideas shared. But the past
year has also shown it may fragment our shared sense of reality. It is our responsibility to amplify the good
effects and mitigate the bad — to continue
increasing diversity while strengthening our common understanding so our community can create the greatest positive
impact on the world.
The two most discussed concerns this past year were about diversity of viewpoints we see (filter bubbles) and
accuracy of information (fake news). I worry
about these and we have studied them extensively, but I also worry there are even more powerful effects we must
mitigate around sensationalism and polarization
leading to a loss of common understanding.
Social media already provides more diverse viewpoints than traditional media ever has. Even if most of our friends
are like us, we all know people with
different interests, beliefs and backgrounds who expose us to different perspectives. Compared with getting our
news from the same two or three TV networks
or reading the same newspapers with their consistent editorial views, our networks on Facebook show us more diverse
content.
But our goal must be to help people see a more complete picture, not just alternate perspectives. We must be
careful how we do this. Research shows that
some of the most obvious ideas, like showing people an article from the opposite perspective, actually deepen
polarization by framing other perspectives
as foreign. A more effective approach is to show a range of perspectives, let people see where their views are on a
spectrum and come to a conclusion on
what they think is right. Over time, our community will identify which sources provide a complete range of
perspectives so that content will naturally
surface more.
Accuracy of information is very important. We know there is misinformation and even outright hoax content on
Facebook, and we take this very seriously.
We’ve made progress fighting hoaxes the way we fight spam, but we have more work to do. We are proceeding carefully
because there is not always a clear
line between hoaxes, satire and opinion. In a free society, it’s important that people have the power to share
their opinion, even if others think they’re
wrong. Our approach will focus less on banning misinformation, and more on surfacing additional perspectives and
information, including that fact checkers
dispute an item’s accuracy.
While we have more work to do on information diversity and misinformation, I am even more focused on the impact of
sensationalism and polarization, and
the idea of building common understanding.
Social media is a short-form medium where resonant messages get amplified many times. This rewards simplicity and
discourages nuance. At its best, this
focuses messages and exposes people to different ideas. At its worst, it oversimplifies important topics and pushes
us towards extremes.
Polarization exists in all areas of discourse, not just social media. It occurs in all groups and communities,
including companies, classrooms and juries,
and it’s usually unrelated to politics. In the tech community, for example, discussion around AI has been
oversimplified to existential fear-mongering.
The harm is that sensationalism moves people away from balanced nuanced opinions towards polarized extremes.
If this continues and we lose common understanding, then even if we eliminated all misinformation, people would
just emphasize different sets of facts
to fit their polarized opinions. That’s why I’m so worried about sensationalism in media.
Fortunately, there are clear steps we can take to correct these effects. For example, we noticed some people share
stories based on sensational headlines
without ever reading the story. In general, if you become less likely to share a story after reading it, that’s a
good sign the headline was sensational.
If you’re more likely to share a story after reading it, that’s often a sign of good in-depth content. We recently
started reducing sensationalism in News
Feed by taking this into account for pieces of content, and going forward signals like this will identify
sensational publishers as well. There are many
steps like this we have taken and will keep taking to reduce sensationalism and help build a more informed
community.
Research suggests the best solutions for improving discourse may come from getting to know each other as whole
people instead of just opinions — something
Facebook may be uniquely suited to do. If we connect with people about what we have in common — sports teams, TV
shows, interests — it is easier to have
dialogue about what we disagree on. When we do this well, we give billions of people the ability to share new
perspectives while mitigating the unwanted
effects that come with any new medium.
A strong news industry is also critical to building an informed community. Giving people a voice is not enough
without having people dedicated to uncovering
new information and analyzing it. There is more we must do to support the news industry to make sure this vital
social function is sustainable — from
growing local news, to developing formats best suited to mobile devices, to improving the range of business models
news organizations rely on.
Connecting everyone to the internet is also necessary for building an informed community. For the majority of
people around the world, the debate is not
about the quality of public discourse but whether they have access to basic information they need at all, often
related to health, education and jobs.
Finally, I want to emphasize that the vast majority of conversations on Facebook are social, not ideological.
They’re friends sharing jokes and families
staying in touch across cities. They’re people finding groups, whether they’re new parents raising kids or newly
diagnosed patients suffering from a disease
together. Sometimes it’s for joy, coming together around religion or sports. And sometimes it’s for survival, like
refugees communicating to find shelter.
Whatever your situation when you enter our community, our commitment is to continue improving our tools to give you
the power to share your experience.
By increasing the diversity of our ideas and strengthening our common understanding, our community can have the
greatest positive impact on the world.
***
Civically-Engaged Community
Our society will reflect our collective values only if we engage in the civic process and participate in self-
governance. There are two distinct types
of social infrastructure that must be built:
The first encourages engagement in existing political processes: voting, engaging with issues and representatives,
speaking out, and sometimes organizing.
Only through dramatically greater engagement can we ensure these political processes reflect our values.
The second is establishing a new process for citizens worldwide to participate in collective decision-making. Our
world is more connected than ever, and
we face global problems that span national boundaries. As the largest global community, Facebook can explore
examples of how community governance might
work at scale.
The starting point for civic engagement in the existing political process is to support voting across the world. It
is striking that only about half of
Americans eligible to vote participate in elections. This is low compared to other countries, but democracy is
receding in many countries and there is
a large opportunity across the world to encourage civic participation.
In the United States election last year, we helped more than 2 million people register to vote and then go vote.
This was among the largest voter turnout
efforts in history, and larger than those of both major parties combined. In every election around the world, we
keep improving our tools to help more
people register and vote, and we hope to eventually enable hundreds of millions of more people to vote in elections
than do today, in every democratic
country around the world.
Local civic engagement is a big opportunity as well as national. Today, most of us do not even know who our local
representatives are, but many policies
impacting our lives are local, and this is where our participation has the greatest influence. Research suggests
reading local news is directly correlated
with local civic engagement. This shows how building an informed community, supportive local communities, and a
civically-engaged community are all related.
Beyond voting, the greatest opportunity is helping people stay engaged with the issues that matter to them every
day, not just every few years at the ballot
box. We can help establish direct dialogue and accountability between people and our elected leaders. In India,
Prime Minister Modi has asked his ministers
to share their meetings and information on Facebook so they can hear direct feedback from citizens. In Kenya, whole
villages are in WhatsApp groups together,
including their representatives. In recent campaigns around the world — from India and Indonesia across Europe to
the United States — we’ve seen the
candidate with the largest and most engaged following on Facebook usually wins. Just as TV became the primary
medium for civic communication in the 1960s,
social media is becoming this in the 21st century.
This creates an opportunity for us to connect with our representatives at all levels. In the last few months, we
have already helped our community double
the number of connections between people and our representatives by making it easier to connect with all our
representatives in one click. When we connect,
we can engage directly in comments and messages. For example, in Iceland, it’s common to tag politicians in group
discussions so they can take community
issues to parliament.
Sometimes people must speak out and demonstrate for what they believe is right. From Tahrir Square to the Tea Party
— our community organizes these demonstrations
using our infrastructure for events and groups. On a daily basis, people use their voices to share their views in
ways that can spread around the world
and grow into movements. The Women’s March is an example of this, where a grandmother with an internet connection
wrote a post that led her friends to
start a Facebook event that eventually turned into millions of people marching in cities around the world.
Giving people a voice is a principle our community has been committed to since we began. As we look ahead to
building the social infrastructure for a global
community, we will work on building new tools that encourage thoughtful civic engagement. Empowering us to use our
voices will only become more important.
***
Inclusive Community
Building an inclusive global community requires establishing a new process for citizens worldwide to participate in
community governance. I hope that we
can explore examples of how collective decision-making might work at scale.
Facebook is not just technology or media, but a community of people. That means we need
Community Standards
that reflect our collective values for what should and should not be allowed.
In the last year, the complexity of the issues we’ve seen has outstripped our existing processes for governing the
community. We saw this in errors taking
down newsworthy videos related to Black Lives Matter and police violence, and in removing the historical Terror of
War photo from Vietnam. We’ve seen this
in misclassifying hate speech in political debates in both directions — taking down accounts and content that
should be left up and leaving up content
that was hateful and should be taken down. Both the number of issues and their cultural importance has increased
recently.
This has been painful for me because I often agree with those criticizing us that we’re making mistakes. These
mistakes are almost never because we hold
ideological positions at odds with the community, but instead are operational scaling issues. Our guiding
philosophy for the Community Standards is to
try to reflect the cultural norms of our community. When in doubt, we always favor giving people the power to share
more.
There are a few reasons for the increase in issues we’ve seen: cultural norms are shifting, cultures are different
around the world, and people are sensitive
to different things.
First, our community is evolving from its origin connecting us with family and friends to now becoming a source of
news and public discourse as well. With
this cultural shift, our Community Standards must adapt to permit more newsworthy and historical content, even if
some is objectionable. For example, an
extremely violent video of someone dying would have been marked as disturbing and taken down. However, now that we
use Live to capture the news and we
post videos to protest violence, our standards must adapt. Similarly, a photo depicting any child nudity would have
always been taken down — and for good
reason — but we’ve now adapted our standards to allow historically important content like the Terror of War photo.
These issues reflect a need to update
our standards to meet evolving expectations from our community.
Second, our community spans many countries and cultures, and the norms are different in each region. It’s not
surprising that Europeans more frequently
find fault with taking down images depicting nudity, since some European cultures are more accepting of nudity
than, for example, many communities in the
Middle East or Asia. With a community of almost two billion people, it is less feasible to have a single set of
standards to govern the entire community
so we need to evolve towards a system of more local governance.
Third, even within a given culture, we have different opinions on what we want to see and what is objectionable. I
may be okay with more politically charged
speech but not want to see anything sexually suggestive, while you may be okay with nudity but not want to see
offensive speech. Similarly, you may want
to share a violent video in a protest without worrying that you’re going to bother friends who don’t want to see
it. And just as it’s a bad experience
to see objectionable content, it’s also a terrible experience to be told we can’t share something we feel is
important. This suggests we need to evolve
towards a system of personal control over our experience.
Fourth, we’re operating at such a large scale that even a small percent of errors causes a large number of bad
experiences. We review over one hundred
million pieces of content every month, and even if our reviewers get 99% of the calls right, that’s still millions
of errors over time. Any system will
always have some mistakes, but I believe we can do better than we are today.
I’ve spent a lot of time over the past year reflecting on how we can improve our community governance. Sitting here
in California, we’re not best positioned
to identify the cultural norms around the world. Instead, we need a system where we can all contribute to setting
the standards. Although this system is
not fully developed, I want to share an idea of how this might work.
The guiding principles are that the Community Standards should reflect the cultural norms of our community, that
each person should see as little objectionable
content as possible, and each person should be able to share what they want while being told they cannot share
something as little as possible. The approach
is to combine creating a large-scale democratic process to determine standards with AI to help enforce them.
The idea is to give everyone in the community options for how they would like to set the content policy for
themselves. Where is your line on nudity? On
violence? On graphic content? On profanity? What you decide will be your personal settings. We will periodically
ask you these questions to increase participation
and so you don’t need to dig around to find them. For those who don’t make a decision, the default will be whatever
the majority of people in your region
selected, like a referendum. Of course you will always be free to update your personal settings anytime.
With a broader range of controls, content will only be taken down if it is more objectionable than the most
permissive options allow. Within that range,
content should simply not be shown to anyone whose personal controls suggest they would not want to see it, or at
least they should see a warning first.
Although we will still block content based on standards and local laws, our hope is that this system of personal
controls and democratic referenda should
minimize restrictions on what we can share.
It’s worth noting that major advances in AI are required to understand text, photos and videos to judge whether
they contain hate speech, graphic violence,
sexually explicit content, and more. At our current pace of research, we hope to begin handling some of these cases
in 2017, but others will not be possible
for many years.
Overall, it is important that the governance of our community scales with the complexity and demands of its people.
We are committed to always doing better,
even if that involves building a worldwide voting system to give you more voice and control. Our hope is that this
model provides examples of how collective
decision-making may work in other aspects of the global community.
This is an important time in the development of our global community, and it’s a time when many of us around the
world are reflecting on how we can have
the most positive impact.
History has had many moments like today. As we’ve made our great leaps from tribes to cities to nations, we have
always had to build social infrastructure
like communities, media and governments for us to thrive and reach the next level. At each step we learned how to
come together to solve our challenges
and accomplish greater things than we could alone. We have done it before and we will do it again.
I am reminded of President Lincoln’s remarks during the American Civil War: “We can succeed only by concert. It is
not ‘can any of us imagine better?’
but, ‘can we all do better?’ The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is
piled high with difficulty, and we must
rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, act anew.”
There are many of us who stand for bringing people together and connecting the world. I hope we have the focus to
take the long view and build the new
social infrastructure to create the world we want for generations to come.
It’s an honor to be on this journey with you. Thank you for being part of this community, and thanks for everything
you do to make the world more open
and connected.
MARK ZUCKERBERG