Mark Zuckerberg Interview Transcript on Facebook Platform for Small Businesses

Norah O’Donnell: (00:00)
The pandemic has taken a toll on local business. A recent survey found nearly half of small businesses have closed temporarily because of the coronavirus. Today Facebook announced Shops, a new product that allows companies to set up online stores via the social media platform.

Joining us now is Facebook’s co-founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg. Mark, good to see you.

Mark Zuckerberg: (00:22)
Good to see you too. Thanks for having me.

Tell us, what makes this new feature unique?

COVID has not just been a health emergency, it’s been a real economic crisis that is putting a lot of strain on small businesses. What we’re seeing are a lot of small businesses are moving more of their business online. We want to make it easier for them to do that too. So Facebook Shops allows a small business to easily set up a shop inside our apps. It will be a very fast experience for people to discover their products and to be able to buy things directly.

Privacy is always a big question. Will my friends know when I buy something on Facebook shops?

No. I mean, we’re not going to tell anyone what you’re buying or your shopping history across our services without your permission. That’s not really a big part of this experience. This is really more about people being able to connect with the small businesses that they care about.

There was a conspiracy video circulating a few weeks ago called Plandemic. That was widely debunked. Why did Facebook take it down?

We view one of our primary responsibilities now is making sure that we can connect people with authoritative information from governments and health officials. That’s one of the reasons why we built this coronavirus information center that we put at the top of our apps and directed more than 2 billion people to go to. There’s harmful misinformation, which is the type of thing that puts people in imminent physical risk. If you’re telling someone that social distancing doesn’t work or that something is proven to be a cure when it isn’t, we want to take that off our services completely.

There’s other misinformation, which is not generally going to cause physical harm, it’s just stuff that’s wrong. We want to stop it from going viral. There we work with independent fact checkers, which has led to us showing about 50 million warning labels on content that people have seen. We have an indication that those warning labels work because 95% of the time when someone sees a piece of content with a warning label, they don’t click through to it.

Facebook has been hesitant in the past to take down misinformation, deep fakes. How is this different from political content?

I think one of the things that’s different during a pandemic is that if people are saying that something is a cure when in fact it could hurt you, I do think that that is qualitatively different. Within the long tradition of free speech and free expression that our country has to not allow things like that. I think you want to have a pretty high bar for telling people they can’t say something.

But, if a political figure shares information about a cure that could cause imminent harm, would that be taken down?

Yes, it would. There’s no exemption on this for anyone in particular. In fact, we’ve had cases of this. The President of Brazil did make a statement saying that there was a drug that was proven everywhere to work and be effective. Of course, there is no drug currently that I’m aware of, at least, that has been proven to be effective everywhere. We took down his statement. I mean, that was very controversial because we were basically taking down something that the President of a major country said, but it clearly violated a policy.

Mark Zuckerberg, thank you.

All right. Thank you.

Mark Zuckerberg Interview Transcript on Facebook Platform for Small Businesses

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