On press call, Zuckerberg says FB users "naturally engage more with sensational content" that comes close to violating its rules. Compares it to cable TV and tabloids, and says, "This seems to be true regardless of where we set our policy lines."

Zuckerberg says FB is in the process of setting up a "new independent body" that users will be able to appeal content takedowns to. Sort of like the "Facebook Supreme Court" idea he previewed earlier this year.
Zuckerberg: "One of my biggest lessons from this year is that when you connect more than 2 billion people, you’re going to see the good and bad of humanity."
This is how Facebook says it's trying to change the engagement pattern on its services. https://t.co/3p0PGc912o
.@RebeccaJarvis asks Zuckerberg if anyone is going to lose their job over the revelations in the NYT story. He dodges, says that personnel issues aren't a public matter, and that employee performance is evaluated all the time.
4 questions on this Q&A so far, all about yesterday's story. (This call was supposed to be about content governance.)

@JoshConstine asks about the Definers/NTK issue, Zuckerberg says "I learned about this relationship when I read the New York Times piece yesterday."
.@KurtWagner8 asked if Facebook ever considered shutting off entirely in Myanmar, given all the violence there. Zuckerberg didn't answer directly, but cited earlier instances when FB took the site down/logged users out because of security concerns.
Zuckerberg gives a little more detail about the Supreme Court they're going to start testing next year. Says "it’s probably not going to handle every single case," but will adjudicate some user complaints "if you’re not happy" with the decision made by FB's internal reviewers.
Shorter version of this call: Facebook is starting a judicial branch to handle the overflow for its executive branch, which is also its legislative branch, also the whole thing is a monarchy.
Other thing: Zuckerberg's answer to @KurtWagner8's "why not shut down in Myanmar to see if it helps stop genocide" question — that FB has, in fact, shut down temporarily due to "security issues" before — was more revealing than he maybe intended!

More from Tech

The entire discussion around Facebook’s disclosures of what happened in 2016 is very frustrating. No exec stopped any investigations, but there were a lot of heated discussions about what to publish and when.


In the spring and summer of 2016, as reported by the Times, activity we traced to GRU was reported to the FBI. This was the standard model of interaction companies used for nation-state attacks against likely US targeted.

In the Spring of 2017, after a deep dive into the Fake News phenomena, the security team wanted to publish an update that covered what we had learned. At this point, we didn’t have any advertising content or the big IRA cluster, but we did know about the GRU model.

This report when through dozens of edits as different equities were represented. I did not have any meetings with Sheryl on the paper, but I can’t speak to whether she was in the loop with my higher-ups.

In the end, the difficult question of attribution was settled by us pointing to the DNI report instead of saying Russia or GRU directly. In my pre-briefs with members of Congress, I made it clear that we believed this action was GRU.

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https://t.co/FBfXhUrH5d


Microorganisms in biofilms are enclosed by an extracellular matrix that confers protection and improves survival. Previous studies have shown that viruses can secondarily colonize preexisting biofilms, and viral biofilms have also been described.


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Biofilms can also enhance virion viability in extracellular environments, such as on fomites and in aquatic sediments, allowing viral persistence and dissemination.