(CNN)Give Mark Zuckerberg credit: He sat for an interview with CNN amid the worst run of media attention ever for the company he founded in a Harvard dorm room 14 years ago.
The problem that was apparent time and time again during Zuckerberg’s sitdown with CNN’s Laurie Segall on Wednesday is that, even as he pledged to solve the problems that have plagued the social media giant — its role in the proliferation of fake news during the 2016 election and the accessing of more than 50 million user profiles by Cambridge Analytica — he acknowledged that doing so is an impossible task.
“We’re serving a community of more than 2 billion people. And, when you give people tools to share and connect I think one of the good things is that a lot of good things happen but unfortunately there’s also some bad things that happen — whether that’s fake news or hate speech or people trying to hurt each other. And our responsibility is just to make (sure) that we amplify all the good in human nature that’s out there. But also to mitigate the bad, right, mitigate people who are trying to abuse people’s security or post offensive things that should be against the community standards.”
In that quote, there are two Zuckerbergs: 1) Zuckerberg the brand manager who understands he is the captain of a ship being lashed by increasingly large waves without any land in sight and 2) Zuckerberg the creature of the internet who understands that regulating human nature — whether on the web or in daily life — is totally and completely impossible.
So, on the one hand, Zuckerberg insists “this isn’t rocket science. We need to make it so that trolls can’t spread fake news. We can get in front of this.”
And then, minutes later, he acknowledges that “with a community of 2 billion people, I can’t promise we’re going to find everything.”
