In our story, you’ll be able to hear the audio of Zuckerberg answering these questions head on. He speaks in terms that can be more charged than his normal public presentation. Here, for example, he is on Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s call for a breakup of the company:
You have someone like Elizabeth Warren who thinks that the right answer is to break up the companies … I mean, if she gets elected president, then I would bet that we will have a legal challenge, and I would bet that we will win the legal challenge. And does that still suck for us? Yeah. I mean, I don’t want to have a major lawsuit against our own government. I mean, that’s not the position that you want to be in when you’re, you know, I mean … it’s like, we care about our country and want to work with our government and do good things. But look, at the end of the day, if someone’s going to try to threaten something that existential, you go to the mat and you fight.Â
Zuckerberg also talks up the value of a massively large Facebook, saying that Facebook’s size is the reason it can invest in promoting election security while Twitter struggles:
It’s why Twitter can’t do as good of a job as we can. I mean, they face, qualitatively, the same types of issues. But they can’t put in the investment. Our investment on safety is bigger than the whole revenue of their company. [laughter] And yeah, we’re operating on a bigger scale, but it’s not like they face qualitatively different questions. They have all the same types of issues that we do.Â
There’s a ton more here, which we’ve presented in
a separate page with a fuller transcript. You can read about Zuckerberg’s plan to stop the halt of TikTok; what he thinks employees should tell friends who have taken a dim view of Facebook lately; and why Zuckerberg usually refuses to testify in front of governments when they ask.
I hope you’ll dig in to (the admittedly lengthy)
transcript and share your own highlights far and wide. We’ll be posting additional highlights from the audio in
The Interface over the next several days. Subscribers will be the first to see it.
It’s a shorter newsletter than usual — we did just email you 12 hours ago, after all. Back at full strength tomorrow.