You are surprised? Here's the mission statement:

> Facebook's mission is to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together. People use Facebook to stay connected with friends and family, to discover what's going on in the world, and to share and express what matters to them.

Encouraging group communication is the primary goal, regardless of the consequences.

It’s one thing to enable people to seek out extremist communities on their own. It’s quite another to build recommendation systems that push people towards these communities. That’s putting a thumb on the scale and that’s entirely Facebook’s doing.

This is one example, and it’s quite possibly a poor example as it is a partisan example, but Reddit allows The_Donald subreddit to remain open, but it has been delisted from search, the front page, and Reddit’s recommendation systems.

It sounds like an honorable goal, doesn't it? But when you build a community that becomes simply a place for shared anger, you allow that anger to be amplified and seem more legitimate.

I thought the most interesting part was Mark asking not to be bothered with these types of issues in the future. By saying do it, but cut it 80%, he sounds like he wants to be able to say he made the decision to "reduce" extremism, but without really making a change.

Hey, Facebook VP here (I work on this). We’ve made some meaningful changes to address this since 2016. We’ve strengthened our enforcement in groups and have been actively working on our recommendation tools as well, for example removing groups with extremist content that violates our policies, from recommendations.

As quoted, the presentation laid out at least one clear metrics by which one could measure your performance.

> “64% of all extremist group joins are due to our recommendation tools”

How does Facebook currently define extremist group and how does that contrast with the definition of extremist group used in the presentation?

Of course, it's hard to assign blame without looking at how "extremist groups" are defined and at whether the recommendation tools do good as well as harm.