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Facebook Businesses Social Networks

Facebook Has a New Mission: Bring the World Closer Together (cnn.com) 106

Posted by msmash from the change-in-plans dept.
Facebook CEO believes the company's primary purpose is a social one -- the same it has had for year -- but he's ready to update this mission for the first time. From a report: "We used to have a sense that if we could just do those things, then that would make a lot of the things in the world better by themselves," Zuckerberg told CNN Tech. "But now we realize that we need to do more too. It's important to give people a voice, to get a diversity of opinions out there, but on top of that, you also need to do this work of building common ground so that way we can all move forward together." The company even has a new mission statement: "To give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together." This marks the first time the company has overhauled its mission, which had previously been "to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected." Zuckerberg believes he has just the tool for the job: Facebook Groups, which are now used by a billion people. "A lot of what we can do is to help create a more civil and productive debate on some of the bigger issues as well," Zuckerberg told CNN Tech.
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Facebook Has a New Mission: Bring the World Closer Together More

Facebook Has a New Mission: Bring the World Closer Together

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  • the closer you are.. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    the easier it is to spy on you and shove ads in your faces.

  • Always (Score:4, Funny)

    by tsa ( 15680 ) on Thursday June 22, 2017 @02:04PM (#54669601) Homepage

    Wasn't that always FB's mission, to bring people closer together? That what social media is about, isn't it?

  • Almost correct... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by evolutionary ( 933064 ) on Thursday June 22, 2017 @02:04PM (#54669607)
    Facebook's goal is to "get everyone together" in a database where our faces can be scanned by various government departments both state and federal, done legally or illegally (including police departments in New York City and Vermont), to track use whenever we pass by a digital camera, whether or not they are charged with a crime, just because...

    • Sheep get easier to control when they are all part of the same flock and trained similarly... That's all this is. Not gonna create any global harmony except through the mechanism of making people think they are bettering themselves through giving up thought autonomy. Generally the bigger the echo chamber is, the less diversity of ideas occurs.

    • Facebook is already doing something similar to that with advertising, taking your interactions with Facebook and combining it with third-party personal data to track you on the Internet. Read that in "Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley" [amzn.to] by Antonio Garcia Martinez. The author sold his engineers and company to Twitter and got hired by Facebook in a three-way deal.

    • Not too bad and deserves the insightful mod. Maybe I'd add a point if I ever got one to give. As usual these years, more disappointed by the lack of funny, however. This is another target-rich topic.

      However, you left out the pragmatic meaning, the metric Facebook will use to assess their "success". You can say that the amount of data they collect is one kind of metric, but the more important metric and the one I believe Facebook uses internally as their primary objective is TIME. How much of our time can Fa

    • Facebook for years has practiced discrimination by forcing employees to live in the silly valley and work in one big huge noisy room. This discriminates against those with families and the neurodiverse.

  • Nope. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    No thanks, Zuck. We don't want to be "together" in tribes lorded over by Facebook Review Teams we can't hold accountable when 250,000 John Smiths from Krasnoyarsk won't stop posting about MAGA, all the while we dumbly give to your free analytics firehose.

    • No thanks, Zuck. We don't want to be "together" in tribes lorded over by Facebook Review Teams

      2 billion users say otherwise, sorry to say

  • Lovely... (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Well, that is not really the mission. That does not bring in any money. The real mission is making an ever better map over peoples relationships.

  • uber (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    He must have been talking to Naomi Klein. Totalitarian communism for all.

  • more like dividing people (Score:5, Insightful)

    by cascadingstylesheet ( 140919 ) on Thursday June 22, 2017 @02:28PM (#54669789) Journal

    I've never seen anything better at dividing people than Facebook. It encourages a mob mentality, whipping people up with the crisis of the day, the two minutes hate.

    Either sign on to the memes or get run over.

    • Yeah all FB is doing is bringing people closer together so they can hear each other yell "GET FUCKED ASSHOLE" more clearly.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Hoodsen ( 751434 )
      Agreed. Additionally, I think the "Like" button has done so much to reduce real social connection and intelligent discussion. No need to have meaningful conversations with someone. Instead, you can give them two seconds of your attention by tapping Like as you scroll through and do the same thing for hundreds of other posts. Disagree with someone's opinion? Why bother with a discussion that could help you understand each other? Just block them from your news feed and stay in your bubble.

      I'm not on Facebo

  • What a bunch of bullshit (Score:4, Informative)

    by Rick Schumann ( 4662797 ) on Thursday June 22, 2017 @02:33PM (#54669823) Journal
    Facebook has one mission and it's the same mission it's always had since Zuckerberg came up with the thing in the first place: make as much money as possible off of your users. This is done by collecting data on them and selling that to advertisers, and (likely) providing that information to government agencies, for which I'll bet they also receive a pretty penny. All this 'bringing the world closer together' more or less translates to 'Let's finish gathering up all the two-legged human sheep of the world and put them in one corral, so it's that much easier to collect data from them that we can sell'. Zuckerberg can and should bugger the hell off.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by GuB-42 ( 2483988 )

      Facebook has one mission and it's the same mission it's always had since Zuckerberg came up with the thing in the first place: make as much money as possible off of your users.

      This can be said of any private company, from mom and pops shop to Walmart.

      • Sure, but you're not seeing my point: he's being disingenuous, pretending to be some sort of humanitarian or something, when it is and always has been about THE MONEY. I'd actually have a modicum of respect for Zuckerberg if he'd just come right out and say it instead of bullshitting everyone.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • Friendica [friendi.ca] accomplishes most of what you want. You can keep your data on a server that you control or at least that is not working against your best interests. It's "what diaspora was supposed to be". The successor to Friendica, Hubzilla [hubzilla.org] basically does what you just said (policy enforced by encryption keys) but on a broader scale than just social networking. Again, the "always on" aspect is easily solved by having your own server. There is a way to do all this social networking stuff that does not sacri
      • So you want them taking the data directly from computers you own instead of you voluntarily, manually submitting it to them? That's pretty much how it would happen.

        Your idea has merit. But it would have to be a subscription-only service in order to pay for itself, because there would be no selling of user data to advertisers so they could target ads at them, or selling it to the government so they can profile you and spy on what you're doing. People would whine and cry about having to pay, and they'd jus

  • "FB brings the world closer together by reducing the distance between ads, and making it more convenient for FB's customers to reach more of FB's product."

  • FB is a now a socialy mandatory tool. We are all obliged to use it, but we all profundly despise it. Zuckerberg can say whatever he wants, it will be judged as it is : BS ....or worse.

    • FB is a now a socialy mandatory tool. We are all obliged to use it,

      Speak for yourself. I stay as far away from that cesspool -- always have. I'm getting along just fine without it.

  • To give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.

    First problem:

    Absence makes the heart grow fonder.

    Second problem:

    Tinfoil is the great equalizer.

    It allows those who really know very little about how the world works (hint: it's complicated) to put up a big front. Any steep ignorance gradient confined to a narrow social context is going to generate a tinfoil IED (improvised exposition device).

    We used to blame Alzheimer's disease on leached aluminum. Boy, were we thinking small.

  • So, I guess they are now actively after everyone.

  • Facebook 2.0 (Score:3)

    by zifn4b ( 1040588 ) on Thursday June 22, 2017 @03:12PM (#54670109)
    The Search for for Money

  • "To give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together."
    --- Facebook

    "Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as 'internationalists' and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure--one world, if you will. If that's the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.”
    David Rockefeller, Memoirs

  • Wasn't FB one of the actors that got caught in the last election trying to shut down viewpoints they didn't agree with? I read this "bring in all viewpoints" talk as "force the viewpoints I agree with on those filthy conservatives".

    • Way worse than that -- FB was effectively paying people to generate and spread falsehood in the name of increasing "user engagement". Without any care that that same "engagement" was destroying people's ability to distinguish fact from fiction.

  • Free communication. What could go wrong? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Mike Van Pelt ( 32582 ) on Thursday June 22, 2017 @03:42PM (#54670331)

    “Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.” -- Douglas Adams.

    • Truly free communication is the greatest thing ever. It made the human race what it is and it's what could save us in the future.

      What you see on Facebook (and the interwebz in general) is NOT free communication. It's a couple lines of text and emojis sent to people you've "friended" because you like them (meaning they think like you). It's an echo chamber of vacuous idle thoughts and social justice outrage.

      Real free communication looks like... you sit down in face to face with a priest in a distraction and

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Truly free communication is the greatest thing ever. It made the human race what it is and it's what could save us in the future.

        Citation desperately needed.

        And there are none to be found here:

        Real free communication looks like... you sit down in face to face with a priest in a distraction and pressure-free environment and have a heart to heart talk, like confessing your sins.

        OFFS

        Or you're brainstorming in a workshop with your co-workers on an important project that you're all interested in succeeding.

        Because work is where everyone feels free to express whatever they want. Yeah, BS.

      • It's far worse than that -- Facebook is the ultimate spam platform constructed to manipulate users with clickbait garbage. Who would have guessed such a thing would screw up social discourse?
  • Facebook's primary objective is clickbait and spam thats why facebook is mostly a walled garden that dont let anonymous browsers in to look at content, they want to make everyone a facebook user so they can send your page clickbait, fake friends with more clickbait and spam

  • To help the people who want what you do to express themselves and then shush everyone else.

    Only in that way can we build a true democracy! Hurray! Democracy!

    "Remember: Everyone has chosen this! Together!" ..
    (((Facebook)))

  • Remember the Coke ad from the 1970s?

    "I'd like to make the world be nice,
    or maybe even nicer".

    No. You'd like to get a load of money by selling coloured fizzy water, you lying bunch of bastards.

  • the World a Coke.

    Sincerely, the Man Who Sold the World

  • Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday June 22, 2017 @06:54PM (#54671451)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Closer to the NSA!

  • Bring the World Closer Together

    Honestly, I doubt even Zuckerberg's ego is massive enough to pull that off!

  • i.e. mass immigration into WHITE countries (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/06/22/population-growth-sharpest-70-years-record-migration-levels/

    There are 538,000 more people here in the U.K. this year than last year. This is an unbelievable figure, and it's the reason why there are endless huge villages being built all over the country, full of hideous, 'modern' houses, with nowhere for white people to escape to any more.

    Apparently, white people simply living around their own kind is a 'crime' today, because the media told you so, and you actually

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