MARK ZUCKERBERG ON FACEBOOK’S FUTURE AND WHAT SCARES HIM MOST

ON WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON, Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, described a sweeping new vision for his platform. “The future of communication,” he wrote, “will increasingly shift to private, encrypted services where people can be confident what they say to each other stays secure.” The post raised all kinds of questions about Facebook’s business model and strategies, as well as the trade-offs the company could face. And so after the post went live, Zuckerberg spoke with WIRED about his vision.

Nicholas Thompson: Mark, thank you for letting me talk to you for a few minutes.

The 3,200-word memo you wrote almost sounds like a manifesto for a new social network. You say, “this privacy-focused platform will be built around several principles.” Is the idea that you will eventually launch a new platform that goes on top of what you have? Or is this just the new direction in which all your products will evolve?

Mark Zuckerberg: The thinking is that there needs to be two types of platforms in the world: one is a more public platform, like the digital equivalent of a town square where you interact with lots of people at once. That’s largely what Facebook and Instagram are. And the other platform is the private space, the digital equivalent to the living room. And the foundation that we have for WhatsApp and Messenger is going to be the starting point for developing those platforms.

But if you look at what we’ve done over the last 15 years, we’ve taken Facebook and then Instagram and really built out whole social platforms around them. So on Facebook, for example, you’re not just posting things at this point. You can join different communities, you can create a page for your small businesses, you can create fund-raisers, you can find people to date through the dating service. There are all these different kinds of utilities for basically all the different things that you would want to do with everyone you know. And we basically built this whole platform around the town square. And it’s really a concept of the whole platform around all the private and intimate interactions that you would want to have. I think that’s really the opportunity here, on top of WhatsApp and Messenger, and what I’m trying to lay out is a privacy-focused vision for this kind of platform that starts with messaging and making that as secure as possible with end-to-end encryption, and then building all of the other kinds of private and intimate ways that you would want to interact—from calling, to groups, to stories, to payments, to different forms of commerce, to sharing location, to eventually having a more open-ended system to plug in different kinds of tools for providing the interaction with people in all the ways that you would want. So that’s the basic vision for what we’re trying to do.

NT: Does News Feed still exist…

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