Thoughts on Zuckerberg's Congressional Testimony

how they make money. But also I think it also showed another side of things aside that what these tech companies are doing is not always transparent to the average person. And I can't knock these guys in Washington for not knowing the inner workings of the Internet and how technology works, because let's face it, most people don't when you think about it. Back in the day, we had newspapers, they

were a trusted source. If something was published in the newspaper or a magazine, well you knew an editor went through it. Now with Facebook, people post stories from all kinds of sources. You don't really know where they're coming from. We have to be the editor at the end of the day. And that's a big job for a lot of people. Most of us have a normal job. We're

sitting there working. We don't have time to fact check every single article or story or posts that we see, so we take it at face value, and as we've seen, that has sort of backfired. Let me go through some of the remarks that Zuckerberg made and I'll kind of comment on some of them. First off, he said, Facebook is an idealistic and optimistic company. From our existence, we've been focused on all the good that connecting people can do.

As Facebook has grown, people everywhere have gotten a powerful new tool for staying connected to the people they love, making their voices heard, and building communities and businesses. All of that is very true. So when you think about Facebook, I mean, it really is connecting people in new ways, connecting people in different ways, in ways that we never

really really thought of. But as they went down that line, we've seen it's been a tough road because we think about the ways that Facebook has always been trying to connect people, but they've come under a lot of heat for the ways that they do that. So these are all things that they're learning from. Zuckerberg then goes on to say, it's clear now we didn't do enough to prevent these tools from being used for harm as well. That goes for fake news, foreign interference and elections, hate speech,

as well as developers and data privacy. And right there he's really talking about what happened with Cambridge Analytica. And here's the thing. When you're something like Facebook, a large organization that's building these tools, you don't necessarily know how everyone's going to use them. Now, you might have an idea how they're going to be used, but you can't figure out every possibility in the world. And I think

that's what he's saying here. So now Facebook, and since twenty fourteen or twenty fifteen, when they change a lot of these things, they have done better, and I think they will now with the spotlight being on them, continue to do better. Zuckerberg goes on to say, it's not just enough to connect people. We want to make sure those connections are positive. So that's a big one too,

because this really deals with fake news. And here's the thing when it comes to Facebook, they want to spread information. It is an amazing place to spread information. If you have an announcement, if you ever had a kid, you put a birth announcement on there, or you say you're

going to the hospital. It's amazing all the people that come out of the woodwork to offer you congratulations or to give you some information, or if you're traveling somewhere, you know how people can tell you, oh, I've been to that place. You can't possibly pull every single one of your friends and say, hey, have you been to France? Tell me the best restaurants. But on Facebook you can

do that. And so again they're saying here that there are tools that really do connect people, but you have to make sure that they're not used to spread misinformation. And that's a tough thing to do because Facebook can't fact check everything that's posted to their site, but they can create some tools that let them figure out what's

good and what's bad. Zuckerberg goes on to say, I believe deeply in what we're doing, and I know that when we address these challenges, we'll look back and view helping people and connecting and giving people voice as a positive force in the world. I remember when I first got my access to Facebook. It was such an honor.

I mean, I remember I used my alumni email address to get access to the website, because you had to have an edu email address to get access to Facebook back in the day, and when I did that, it was like a whole new world had been unlocked to me, and a lot of people thought that way, and we've gotten away from that. Now we take Facebook for granted, but the reality is it has done a lot of good for people. But at the same time, it has become a huge force in our lives, and Facebook needs

to know that. They need to be cognizant of the strength that they have and of the power that they have. And that's part of this learning situation. By the way, So what's the point about all this tracking? Why do these companies want to track us so badly? It all comes down to one thing money. I've said this before. They want to sell us stuff, whether it's Facebook selling ads, whether it's Google selling ads, whether it's Target getting us

into their store to buy stuff. The more that they know about us, the easier it is to sell us stuff. And the more that companies know about us, the better it is for advertisers who want to target us. And that's really what's going on here. So when you think about Facebook, what they're doing is they're trying to collect as much data on us as possible because that way

marketers can sell us stuff in an easy way. If you're on Facebook back in the early days, you would see a bunch of ads in your news feed, and the biggest complaint about those ads on the side was that they meant nothing to you. They'd be for products that you just didn't care about. Well, now, obviously Facebook has gotten really good at targeting us, so a lot of the ads you see are for products that a lot of people say, Oh, I was just thinking about

that product, or I search for that product. Same thing with Instagram, same thing with pretty much any website that uses Google Ads or any sort of online major online ad provider. In reality, this is kind of a good thing for us because think about it, it's bad for your wallet because you're probably going to spend more money, but it's a good thing because you're interested in the products that you see, or you could be interested in

the products you see back in the day. Let's just use the hypothetical of watching a national telecast, right, so millions of people would be watching that show. You'd probably see an ad for a really broad product like Colgate toothpaste. Millions of people would see that ad. It would build brand awareness. Yes, maybe a percentage of those people would purchase it. Now we're getting highly targeted ads for products that we may like, that we may be interested in

for the time period in our lives. And this is really nothing new. It just happens to be on the Internet. So it's much more optimized. Think about when you went to the mall. You saw that big shiny car in the center of the mall that you can win. Well, guess what it wasn't just hey, let's just pick someone out of a raffle, No, it was fill out this card that asked you everything, where you live, how much you make, what your email address is, what your cell

phone number is. Well, they're given away that car that might cost thirty thousand dollars, but they're gathering thousands of dollars worth of data on the individuals that enter the raffle. I Guess what happens to that information? It's all sold and resold to marketers, and that's what it's all about. So this has been going on from the beginning of time. It's just that companies like Facebook and Google have gotten

extremely good at it. Overall, putting all this stuff on TV and having this all come to light is a good thing for all of us, because tech companies in general are now going to realize that they can't get away with all the crazy stuff that they might have been able to get away with in the past. There you have it. Thanks so much for listening, rich Demiro rich on tech dot TV. Tell me what you think. You can tweet me on Twitter or on Facebook as well. I know you're still on there because I am so

Thanks so much for listening. I'll talk to you real soon.