The infantilism of Mark Zuckerberg

Sometimes, one has to marvel at the naïveté and ignorance of the Facebook boss. Yesterday, he gave an off-the-record talk to a group of selected journalists, one of whom (thankfully) was Adrienne LaFrance. Here’s an excerpt from her report:

According to Zuckerberg, the way you find common ground—a common set of facts—is not through professional news outlets, but via individuals. And Facebook, with its 2 billion or so users, has plenty of individuals. But while Zuckerberg said Facebook has begun ranking news outlets by trustworthiness, in person, he didn’t seem to distinguish among the quality of opinions.

“I do think that in general within a news organization there is an opinion,” he said. “I do think that a lot of what you all do is have an opinion and have a view.”

And Facebook, he says, simply “has more opinions.” Show users more opinions, and you give them more options. “It’s not about saying here’s one view; here’s the other side,” Zuckerberg said when I asked him to reconcile the contradiction. “You should decide where you want to be.”

Deciding what to believe based on other people’s opinions is not only not journalistic, it’s arguably hostile to the press as a democratic institution. The truth may be nuanced, but reportable facts are often quite straightforward. As any journalist can tell you, the best answer to the question “what happened?” is not why don’t you ask a bunch of your friends what they think, organize their views along a spectrum, and then decide where to plant yourself.