CREATED 10-31-21

Mr. Zuckerberg:

In the words of the immortal Shakespeare: “That which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet.” But Shakespeare’s flip side is that Facebook renamed as Meta Platforms still smells as the same.

Nevertheless, maybe this inflexion point is a good time for you to offer a new kind of account. I wrote to you in 2018 with this idea:

There are aspects of FB that are brilliant, and I would pay $10 a month for a Facebook Lite program that would enable me to connect with friends and family without all the news postings and other huge problems of the current setup.

The above “huge problems” means a Facebook Lite without advertising content, without mining of personal data for revenue. This would likely mean likely much less hacking, and presumably an end to the loss of millions of pieces of confidential personal information. $10 a month seems reasonable, and maybe an upgrade option at $12 a month with newsfeed – but only if you radically change Facebook’s “news”-handling algorithms.

And, a new idea: what about a good-news option? I don’t mean just rescued puppies and 5-year-olds’ lemonade stands, I mean substantive good news about life on this troubled planet. Yes Magazine and The Week have good-news feeds. We need much more of this.

I puzzle about why you haven’t yet tried out a fee-based clean Facebook business model. Perhaps you could make even MORE money! And obviously nobody else can try creating such a business (except maybe Donald Trump, with whom I feel you have a lot in common) because you would sue them into extinction.

I wrote previously because I found your 2018 testimony before the US Senate to be highly embarrassing; it made me cringe. It’s only a matter of time before US legislation starts to regulate you, with a good and necessary kick in the rear from heroine Frances Haugen. Britain is considering legislation to rein Facebook/ Meta in, as is the European Union. Australia has passed a world-first law aimed at making Google and Facebook pay for news content on their platforms. I believe Facebook Lite, if it met the standards I’m suggesting, would not face substantive additional regulation.

In 2018 it was reported that you had a payroll of 20,000 people weeding out unsuitable news. Recently I read that this figure is now 40,000. Holy cow! What a waste of precious human resources; what a horrible, soul-destroying job that must be.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if Facebook would reduce these jobs by re-writing the algorithms that exponentially proliferate such ugly stories? Then you could use the rest of the payroll money to hire or pay for real journalists to actually go out and collect primary date i.e., frontline news. Or you could make payroll grants to real journalism organizations, such as newspapers. Jeff Bezos went out and purchased a newspaper; you could consult with him about journalistic standards and what is meant by primary data collection and verification.

How many Facebook news reports resulted in a reporter’s death this year? Zero. About 50 real journalists died out there in pursuit of stories of real news from dangerous places. In my opinion, it’s time for Facebook to man up and do the real work of journalism.