In a startling statement, billionaire social media tycoon, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, has said that the people of California should not think of themselves as the ones to decide the values of people the world over.
In a recent mission statement titled “Building a Global Community,” the billionaire entrepreneur elaborated on the mission for his company going forward. He said his mission focused on connecting individuals across the planet. His plan includes a voting system. Fast Company had a chat with Zuckerberg to get more details on the plan.
“At the very end of your letter you mention building a global voting system. You’re not talking about political voting. What is that about?”
Zuckerberg clarified that the voting system is in part, comprehending that cultures and lines exist from region to region, and a major part of developing a global community is to allow different communities to decide for themselves what is best for them, and not some people in a state that has its own principles and values.
“I was talking about collective decision making. One of the things that we have struggled with recently is how do we have a set of community standards that can apply across a community of almost two billion people. 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. The question is, in a larger community, how do you build mechanisms so that the community can decide for itself and individuals can decide for themselves where they want the lines to be? This is a tricky part of running this company. In setting the nudity policy, for example, we are not trying to impose our values on folks, we’re trying to reflect what the community thinks. 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. So we need to evolve the systems for collective decision making. It’s an interesting problem. There are certainly going to be a lot more global infrastructure and global enterprises going forward, there just hasn’t been anything at this scale yet.”
Zuckerberg further explained that there will be guidelines in place. For example, Facebook will obviously not allow child pornography on the site, nor will the incitement of violence against any race or people be allowed. However, when it comes to the operation of Facebook’s policies in the future, it will be community driven.