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Evasive Zuckerberg shows the Orwellian danger Of Facebook
Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony in front of 44 US Senators was chilling to watch. On display was Silicon “Catch me if you can” Valley vs. the United States Congress. Does Zuckerberg realize how truth-dodging he looked and sounded? Or is he as notoriously tongue-tied as they say and can’t help himself? Or does the 33-year-old billionaire CEO just not care, as long as the Senators leave his Frankenstein creation alone? Certainly this was an exercise in damage control, but in the process Zuckerberg provided yet another window into the nature of his company, his leadership, as well as much of Silicon Valley.
By the end of the hearing, I was left with the daunting question of whether Zuckerberg and his computer geniuses really understand their own monster creation. Facebook’s AI has been built (or more accurately, cobbled together) over several years by hundreds of different developers and programmers. Professor Zeynep Tufekci from Harvard University describes the Facebook algorithm as “giant matrices, maybe millions of rows and columns, and not even the programmers understand anymore how exactly it is operating.” There are so many variables that go into its complex and proprietary sorting that Facebook cannot say with authority why something will or will not appear in a user’s news feed, or how and why suddenly Russian trolls and their bots were able to…
