Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg is struggling with the company’s global expansion and different expectations for free speech.
The solution? Building a platform that allows different communities to decide what is and isn’t OK.
“We have come to this realization that a bunch of people sitting in a room in California is not going to be the best way to reflect all the local values that people have around the world,” Silicon Valley superstar Zuckerberg reflected in a recent interview with Fast Company.
For instance:
“One example that has been quite controversial has been nudity. There are very different cultural norms ranging from country to country. In some places, the idea that showing a woman’s breasts would be controversial feels backwards. But there are other places where images that are at all sexually suggestive, even if they don’t show nudity, just because of a pose, that’s over the line.”
Zuckerberg hasn’t figured out the solution, but that’s one big problem he was trying to address in February when he wrote about a “global voting system” as part of a 6,000-word manifesto, “Building Global Communities”. He was not, he says, talking about political voting.
“You give people a voice and then you figure out what the implications of that are, and then you work on those things,” he emphasized. “It’s just this constant work in progress.”