Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has all praises for SpaceX and Tesla chief Elon Musk For turning Twitter “a lot leaner” which has been extremely got good for the industry” as a whole. At the ‘ The Lex Friedman Podcast’ show, Zuckerberg said that Musk “led a push early on to make Twitter a lot leaner“.
Zuckerberg told the host, “I think that those were generally good changes. I also think that it was probably good for the industry that he made those changes because my sense is that there were a lot of other people who thought that those were good changes but who may have been a little shy about doing them.”
As per the Meta founder and chief, the The outgoing Twitter CEO’s painstaking efforts to reform platform into a much more technical space by reducing layers of management, bridging the gap between engineers of the company and himself was a pleasant move in the right direction. Post acquiring the platform for $44 billion, Musk reduced down the Twitter employees’ count to around 1000 from nearly 7800.
Similar to Musk, Zuckerberg also carried out several rounds of layoffs over the last few months, slacking of a good 21,000 employees in the course of time. In the interview, he had dubbed the current year as Meta’s “year of efficiency”.
He recently said, “As part of the year of efficiency, we’re focusing on returning to a more optimal ratio of engineers to other roles. It’s important for all groups to get leaner and more efficient to enable all technology groups to get as lean and efficient as possible.”
Even on the podcast, Zuckerberg discussed his decision to layoff houses of employees.
“Layoffs are uniquely challenging and tough in that you have a lot of people leaving for reasons that are not connected to their own performance. Really, it is just a strategy decision and sometimes financially required, but not fully in our case,“ Zuckerberg said. He further added, “I decided we needed to get to a point where we are a lot leaner.”
Zuckerberg hailed Twitter for its innovative community notes feature, which is aimed at promoting transparency and collaborative contacts sharing in order to suppress potentially misleading information. He also acknowledged The consistent patterns that social media companies encounter in dealing with harmful content. He underlines the prevalence of phishing scams, social engineering and the proliferation of bots as major contemporary concerns in the tech industry.
He also emphasised that the company has been persistently working hard to create advanced AI systems capable of tracking and segregating such harmful content. The tech mogul also praised Twitter’s community notes feature, which enhances the user experience.
Focusing on the nuanced nature of the problem, he suggested that it is best to simplify this issue by emphasising on the harms that people commonly agreed upon. According to him, the important question while determining if something is missing information or not is whether it has the ability to cause physical harm to people. By using this approach, the recognition of harmful content can be prioritised.
Zuckerberg also mentioned the importance of adding flags is to better user experience rather than to erase information. He also said that people have different preferences on how they wants information to be flagged – some people would like a flag indicating that a fact checker has identified potential miss information.
