Mark Zuckerberg «It’s pretty good to be me»

Gorbachev: You always say that the mission of Facebook and your personal goal is to make the world more open. What does that mean to you exactly? How do you imagine the ideal open world?

— You know, I grew up and I’ve had the Internet since elementary or middle school. And I remember using Google for the first time in middle school and just thinking: Okay, we have all this access to information now, and that’s so different from every other generation before this. But there was one thing that was always missing. You can find out a lot of facts with search engines, but the thing that people are interested in the most is what’s going on with the people they care about. The only way that information can be made available is if people share it themselves. And sharing what’s going on with you is really a core part of being human. But people didn’t have the tools to do that before. That’s a lot of what a more open world is to me — people have this need to connect with other people, and I think that if they have tools to do that, it just makes sense that you can be more plugged in and know what’s going on with the people around you.

Gorbachev: But do you agree that many people are still protective of their privacy? Do you think they will eventually give in?

— Five or 10 years ago a lot of people were scared of social networks. Now, some people are still skeptical, but there are definitely more and more people who want to participate. The other thing is that different people want to share with different audiences. Some people are public figures who want to reach millions of people at the same time, while some people just want to share with their friends. Some people want to share with only a few friends at a time, or with their family. But I don’t know anyone who doesn’t want to share anything with anyone. So it’s just a question of what type of tools you want to use. There are people who have their own pages, while others primarily use things like SMS, e-mail, or chat — and we consider that sharing, too. And Facebook is the biggest chat system in the world, with billions and billions of messages a day.

Gorbachev: Are there limits to this openness? Do you think we will share more about ourselves in the future than we do now?

— I think it’s just getting starting. We track this, and every year the amount of things a person is sharing seems to grow at this nearly exponential rate. So if on average you’re sharing one thing a day this year, it will probably be two things next year, then four and so on. One of the things contributing to this trend is phones, which make it so there are more times when you can share something. Another factor is that now more apps are social. Almost every new app that gets made is integrated with different social features. Of the top 400 apps in the App Store, 50 percent are already plugged into Facebook. That means that you don’t have to be using Facebook just to be using Facebook — almost everything you’re using is plugged in and you can be sharing.

Dementieva: Facebook allows people to observe their acquaintances practically all the time. And you, as a result, can observe a billion people all at once. Have you learned anything new about people by observing them on Facebook?

— One question I’m often asked that is similar to the one you’re asking is: How is Facebook different in different countries? It’s pretty reasonable to expect that people would use the service differently — but it turns out they don’t. Everyone has friends and family, and the things they do are pretty similar across different countries. What else? Well, people are really smart and adaptive. There are all these little cues, and what people share — it’s just really nuanced. Facebook isn’t trying to outthink a problem. People are so smart and capable of figuring everything out themselves that what we need to do is just to give them these awesome tools.

Dementieva: Facebook tends to be used to show off one’s wittiness, to post interesting photos from one’s travels, to brag about career achievements — in a word, to present one’s life in a favorable light. How do you feel about that?

— When people are doing anything — whether choosing what to wear in the morning or what to say — you’re going to project an image or an identity for yourself that you’re proud of. The same is true with what people want to share. They might find some news article that they think is really interesting or is in line with their values. Or they went on a trip and took a photo and that’s what they want to project, that they went on an adventure. Generally, people want to share the stuff that makes them feel good, that reflects their image of themselves. Whether it’s the whole truth, I don’t know, but Facebook is really about you controlling what you share with other people.

Dementieva: In Russia, Facebook is more a place for friends and co-workers, as opposed to relatives. Mothers and grandmothers tend to prefer other social networks.

— Hopefully that’s only for now. People want to use the products their friends are using. There is some effect where if all the other students are on the same network, it’s going be a little bit harder to get them to switch to something new. But it does happen.

Gorbachev: What do you think about the oft-discussed idea that Facebook has replaced real friendship? For instance, people have stopped calling their friends as often to wish them a happy birthday because it’s so much easier to write it on their Facebook wall.

— We actually spend a lot of time doing research on this. There are people who you’re actually really close with, and when it’s their birthday, or if you would’ve hung out with them before, you still hang out with them. Facebook isn’t necessarily about how you communicate with the people you’re really close with. It’s a lot about how you stay in touch with the people who would otherwise be difficult to stay in touch with. What Facebook makes possible is that now, instead of just spending a lot of time with the same five or 10 or 15 people, you can know when it’s, say, your hundredth friend’s birthday, which you probably would’ve forgotten about otherwise. Maybe that isn’t a person you would’ve gotten dinner with normally, but now you have a way to take 30 seconds and wish them a happy birthday — and that’s nice.

Dementieva: So could you say that Facebook has made people nicer?

— There’s this view of technology that all technology tools just extend natural human abilities. Glasses extend your ability to see; a bicycle or a car extends your ability to move around faster. And Facebook extends your ability to connect with people and maintain relationships. It doesn’t replace it — it just makes it possible for you to do it more. There’s actually a lot of research on this topic — you must have heard of Dunbar’s number, the average number of social ties a person can maintain. It’s like 150 people, and I think Facebook extends that. Now you can know what’s going on with 200 people or 300 people. And that’s valuable.

Gorbachev: Do you see any downsides to having a more open world?

— I think that people being able to connect with whoever they want is pretty strongly net positive. But like any change in the world, the process can be painful. There are these stories about Facebook from early on when people would post photos doing really stupid things — and they didn’t realize that they should share them privately. We gave them all the controls, but people hadn’t been through the cycle yet and didn’t understand the ramifications of it. Now there have been so many news articles written about it, and people have lived with these types of product for years, so I think they understand how to use them better.

Dementieva: Looking at your Facebook profile, you seem to like everything that has the potential to win over the planet — McDonald’s, the show “Star Trek,” the band U2. Do you like anything small, anything completely local?

— Like my dog? He’s pretty local. One of the things that’s cool with technology is that almost anyone can post something online and potentially reach everyone in the world if people find it interesting. That’s cool. It used to be that when you started a restaurant or a small shop, it was very hard to do something that reached everyone in the world. Now, instead of having a video site for the U.S., a video site for Russia, a video site for every country, there can be just one video site that’s the best and that everyone has the benefit of using. But in terms of local things, you can’t have one Mexican restaurant for the whole world. Well, it’s possible in theory, but we’re not there yet.

Gorbachev: How do you envision the future of Facebook?

— I think the network is going to be this hub that every app you use will plug into, and all the apps will automatically know about the people you care about. These are not things we’re going to do ourselves — we’re not a games company, or a music company, or an education company. But different people will be building different apps that re-imagine all those different fields, and they’re going to be plugged into something like Facebook. Music and games are there already, but it’s going to have new marketplaces — education tools, health tools, finance tools, all kinds of stuff.

Dementieva: At the moment, Facebook is mainly a place for spending free time. Will it stay that way, or will it fill up with things like stores, auctions and banks at some point?

— There are a lot of markets that are getting started. A big trend that a bunch of new startups are based around is the sharing economy. Maybe you’ve heard of apps like Airbnb and Task Rabbit? Airbnb is about sharing homes, and Task Rabbit is about connecting people with other people who can do tasks for them, like delivering a package. A big problem that these companies have when they get started is that people need to make sure they can trust this person who they’ll be letting into their home — to make sure that this is a real person. Having everyone link to their Facebook profile, you can make sure that they have real friends, or can even show how you might know them, through a path showing that they know this person who knows this person who is your friend. This can facilitate trust. I’m actually really excited about that.

Gorbachev: There’s this widespread opinion that you want to turn the entire Internet into Facebook.

— We process the world through people. You look at this room and what do you see? You don’t fixate on the electrical outlet or the floor — you see that there are seven people in the room and they’re doing this and this and that. So much of our brains are wired toward reading other peoples’ emotions and language and being able to communicate with people. That’s what we care about. So it makes sense that the products we want to use the most focus on the people around us. We’re not trying to get all products into Facebook. What we want is for all the apps you use to be able to plug in to Facebook, so that you can use Facebook to make those experiences better.

Gorbachev: In addition to everything else it is, Facebook is a massive archive of human behavior models. Could it be used not just for communication, but for something else? For example, along with friends’ recommendations and pages, could you have some kind of psychiatrist robot that would give people advice on how to behave?

— [Laughs.] We don’t spend a lot of time thinking about that and we don’t accumulate a lot of data on human behavior. What we do spend a lot of time on is analysis of the types of things people post. We think about how to make it easy to put the content in. So things like newsfeed are what we spend a lot of time on. Every day there are hundreds or thousands of things that people who you’re connected to have done, and we want to rank them so that when you sign in, the most interesting stuff is at the top. We can show you a photo that your close friend took, or we can show you that someone you’re friends with, but who you don’t care about that much, liked two pages. Maybe if your girlfriend likes a page, that’s the most interesting thing to you that day.

Dementieva: How do you feel about the fact that Facebook has been used as a political tool as well in recent years? People use it to form groups, organize protests, plot revolutions.

— Well, it’s not the main thing that’s happening on Facebook. But it makes sense, because what we do is allow people to express themselves and communicate in the way they want. Most of the time people just talk about the things that are going on during their day, or things that they care about. But a very small fraction of the time, people are going to think: wow, I feel really strongly about this political thing. Or I’m trying to sell something, or it’s something related to business. The platform works for all these purposes because it allows people to share anything they want.

Gorbachev: You’re known for being a fervent supporter of freedom of speech on the Internet, and this year Facebook released an official statement opposing the anti-piracy laws SOPA and PIPA. Did you know that the Russian parliament just passed a law that allows the government to shut down any website that contains content it considers unacceptable?

— It’s interesting. I think the goals they’re talking about are clearly good goals — they want to have the Internet be clean and to remove illegal content and child pornography. There should be a way to filter that kind of content. I think the question is: How broad are the controls they have, and how broadly do they apply them? So, if you take a network like Facebook, where there are almost a billion people using it, and if someone shares something bad, then we have this procedure in place — someone can contact us and we’ll deal with it pretty quickly. But there are so many users and so many people contacting us all the time that sometimes it will take us a few hours, or a day. So if laws like this are used to say, okay, if there was ever any bad content that any of your users ever posted, then we’ll block the whole site, obviously it’s going to be hugely detrimental. It would also have really big implications for any company that wanted to get started, because every company is going to be social to some extent. Going forward, people are going to be sharing stuff on all these services, and these companies need to be insulated to some degree to things that an individual user posts. But, at the same time, companies like Facebook need to be responsible for policing the content. So how exactly it gets implemented is very important. If they say that some piece of content is bad and you’ve let it be up for years, then maybe it’s reasonable to block the site. But if someone posts something and it’s been there for like an hour, and they block your site — that’s pretty close to censorship. At some point the government can use it to take things down that it doesn’t like, which I think is pretty bad for a society.

Dementieva: You went on a popular late-night show on Russian TV. It was somewhat unusual for you, I believe, to appear on a comedy show like “Evening Urgant”?

— Did you see it? Well, I didn’t have to say anything, so I was happy. I came to Russia because it’s an important market in the world, and for me it’s really interesting to get a sense of who is using Facebook here and how they think about it. Russia is also one of the last countries in the world where Facebook is not the leading social network. But there are some people who really like being public, and that’s just not me. I do very few trips and almost all my time I’m in the office in Palo Alto with our product team, building stuff.

Dementieva: Is it true that almost all the key elements of Facebook are thought up at hackathons, where programmers work on some problem for 24 hours? And that these events have pizza and deejays?

— The basic idea behind hackathons is that we want to give people time to focus on new ideas. The idea is not that people are going to build something and ship it in one night. But they can build a prototype that is half-working, so that we can see what an idea could be like if we spend another month to build it out. We have this saying at Facebook: “Code wins arguments.” You can spend so much time debating about something in the abstract. But when someone just sits down and writes it, it moves the discussion forward and proves that it should work one way or the other. It’s a really valuable part of our culture to give everyone the chance to contribute ideas. We do have snacks — we have these great chefs at the company. Everyone wants to participate in hackathons in some way, so even if you’re not an engineer, they want to do something — for instance, the chefs stay up all night cooking different things. We don’t bring in deejays, but a lot of people at Facebook are into electronic music, so they will just deejay themselves. A lot of stuff for Facebook did come originally from hackathons. The first version of chat was built at a hackathon, the first version of video. And a prototype of the Like button.

Gorbachev: I’m sure you’ve heard that many people want a Dislike button. But it seems you have no plans to create one?

— We certainly take feedback from people really seriously. So when a lot of people kept writing us saying that we needed to make our mobile app faster, we spent a long time rewriting the whole app. And a lot of people ask for a Dislike button. There are times when people want to express sympathy, like, oh, your dog died. For those cases, it may be a good feature. But if people are looking for a way to tell other people that they think their content is bad, I don’t think it’s a very valuable thing to have. That’s kind of mean. We want to make sure it doesn’t get used for mean purposes.

Gorbachev: Finally, the most obvious question: How do you feel about being an international celebrity? Is it at all difficult?

— I think it’s pretty good to be me. There is the material aspect, but the money isn’t that big a deal. I have like 20 of these gray t-shirts, and that’s what I wear every day. One thing I really like is that when I was starting out, I was coding things by myself that I thought were cool ideas. Now, I can work with a thousand awesome engineers to build more things that I find really cool, and we can build them fast. I feel really lucky to be in that position.