Wow, that's really interesting. Hadn't noticed the change in the mission statement. For reference, it used to be: "Give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected."
They changed from making the world more "open" to making it "closer", which are antonyms in a certain way. They changed from the idea of having Facebook be this sort of universal community of people getting together to searching for more intimacy, getting people closer, etc. but they keep talking about "the world."
I've always thought there was room for an "anti-Facebook" that would be the opposite of their original vision statement. Its goal is not to "share things", i.e. to make things public, but to create more private communities that are tighter; not to make the world "more connected" (everyone having 5000 friends) but better connected (i.e. the value of relationships is higher).
It seems like FB may be trying to go in that direction after all, but who knows what they really meant.
It seems to be facebook acknowledging that close-ties networks are of significantly more long term transactional value than the loose-ties network who's value is almost entirely advertorial.
Not much. If they can still be the place where all the small communities gather then they still have all the data. It's clearly in Facebook's best interest to provide maximum value to their users; whether that is small or large groups doesn't matter to them.
They meant that several EU countries are pushing them to "do something" about terrorism and nationalism spreading on social networks so they are preemptively increasing moderation under slogans of unity, community and understanding before politicians come up with some byzantine hate speech enforcement which would bring them serious costs or kick them out of this market altogether.
They changed from making the world more "open" to making it "closer", which are antonyms in a certain way. They changed from the idea of having Facebook be this sort of universal community of people getting together to searching for more intimacy, getting people closer, etc. but they keep talking about "the world."
I've always thought there was room for an "anti-Facebook" that would be the opposite of their original vision statement. Its goal is not to "share things", i.e. to make things public, but to create more private communities that are tighter; not to make the world "more connected" (everyone having 5000 friends) but better connected (i.e. the value of relationships is higher).
It seems like FB may be trying to go in that direction after all, but who knows what they really meant.