Towards a A Better Facebook

I’m Mark Zuckerberg and I want to tell you about some big changes we’re announcing at Facebook today and why.

I founded Facebook based on the desire to better connect my college classmates in 2005. It quickly became apparent that what I built in my dorm room was going way beyond my classmates, so I opened it up to other colleges and soon, opened it to anyone who wanted to connect. We’ve succeeded beyond our wildest dreams and now connect nearly two billion people worldwide.

I’m incredibly proud of what our team has achieved.

But some things didn’t go as well as I had hoped, and there were unintended consequences — some of them significant. Some used our platform for purposes we didn’t envision and we frankly built functionality where maybe we shouldn’t have. Today, we want to make Facebook a better & safer place.

So what’s changing? First, Facebook is becoming a Benefit Corporation. Yes, this is a big change but Facebook has allowed me the freedom to do this, and has already created great wealth for thousands of our employees and share holders. We expect Facebook will continue to be profitable but, but our top priority will now be our members, not our bottom line.

So, what is a Benefit Corporation? It is one that has a specific set of non-monetary objectives to meet in it’s charter.

Here are our initial Benefit Bylaws. We want to hear from you about what other ideas will help build a better Facebook, and will strive to increase society’s well-being and wealth.

1. We want to make Facebook safer, so we are implementing rigorous privacy controls for our members. We have joined TrustArc for independent oversight of our policies and implementation.
2. Facebook will no longer accept political advertising. Further, we will be more vigiliant to ensure that our platform is not abused for political or other advocacy purposes via our customer service staff which numbers nearly 100,000 people. Those who abuse this policy, will have their accounts suspended.
3. Facebook is taking down it’s news section. News is important but we don’t think we are best at choosing what sources our members prefer.
4. Mitigating fake news: We are also committed to working harder & smarter to block fake news, conspiracy theories and similar. Key words will get flagged and our system will remove such comments and block the accounts of repeat offenders. This will also make things easier on our community support teams (over 100,000 people) for whom this can be stressful work.
5. We are about a safe community for all ages so expletives will be blocked because they are just not helpful. If you want to do that, there are other places to do it, but not at Facebook. This will also make life less stressful our moderators and we’ll strive to have moderators fluent in all the languages our members post in.
6. We want you to see more of your friends, so we’re changing our algorithm to help you keep up with your entire community better vs. those who you interact with most. We’re also allowing members to select an unfiltered news feed just as it is posted from your friends.
7. Facebook will donate 50% of it’s net profit to non-profit organizations to extend our community mission. We are partnering with Charity Navigator, and Great Non-Profits to ensure we make the best investments and are setting up an independent board to help guide our investments.
8. We are eliminating the wage & benefit gap between employees & contractors. Everyone should be paid a living wage from our developers to our food servers & janitorial staff worldwide.
9. We want to hear from you about what you want, consistent with being a safe place to socialize, so we’ll be doing more surveys to get your input.

This is a wishful-thinking parody of course, but please comment with your thoughts.