In the email, sent on September 15, 2021, the Meta CEO questioned whether the company should overhaul its strategy on internal safety research, arguing that industry rivals like Apple , Google ’s YouTube and Snap (parent company of Snapchat) conduct far less investigation into societal harm and escape harsh public fallout as a result.
The message, sent under the subject line “Social issue research and analytics – privileged and confidential”, shows Zuckerberg privately evaluating whether Meta’s aggressive self-examination was actively backfiring against the business. An old, confidential internal communication sent by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg to the company’s top leadership has surfaced online.
Because its aggressive detection and reporting made it appear that abusive behavior was more widespread on its own apps, rather than being condemned for failing to combat child sexual abuse material (CSAM) in the past, Meta ended up taking more public heat simply. Because the fact that we report more material makes it seem like there’s more of that behavior on our platforms, instead of being harshly criticized for not doing anything to fight CSAM historically, we have faced more criticism. Zuckerberg singled out Apple as a prime example of a competitor benefiting from doing the bare minimum when policing communications. He noted that, to his knowledge, Apple does not study these societal issues, employs nobody to review or moderate user content, and lacks even a basic user reporting flow within iMessage. Zuckerberg pointed out that this hands-off approach worked remarkably well for the Cupertino company. The Meta CEO observed that YouTube deliberately keeps its head down to avoid becoming a primary target for public criticism. For platforms like Twitter and Snap, Zuckerberg suggested that smaller balance sheets and limited operational budgets might simply prevent them from conducting exhaustive internal research. Apple, for example, doesn’t seem to study any of this stuff. As far as I understand, they don’t have anyone reviewing or moderating content and don’t even have a report flow in iMessage. They’ve taken the approach that it is people’s own responsibility what they do on the platform, and by Apple not taking that responsibility upon themselves, they haven’t created a staff or plethora of studies examining the tradeoffs in their approach. This has worked surprisingly well for them. Interestingly, when Apple did try to do something about SAM, they were roundly criticized for it, which may encourage them to double down on their original approach.