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Journalism of Courage
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who has taken up a personal challenge to visit every state in the United States, has in a new post confirmed that this isn’t about trying to be President in 2020 or running for any other elected office in the US.
“Some of you have asked if this challenge means I’m running for public office. I’m not. I’m doing it to get a broader perspective to make sure we’re best serving our community of almost 2 billion people at Facebook and doing the best work to promote equal opportunity at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative,” writes Zuckerberg in the blogpost in which he shares key takeaways from his ongoing travels across America.
In the state of Ohio, he says he sat down with drug addicts who told him that the way to fight the addiction was detox and then finding a new set of friends. “If you stay friends with the people you were using with — or even with people who are using on their own — you’re almost guaranteed to relapse. It’s tough when those people are your close friends and even tougher when they’re your family, but building new relationships is the most important predictor of staying clean,” Zuckeberg wrote in the post.
In Indiana, he says he learned that the juvenile justice centre there housed children who had committed serious crimes like murder and robbery as well as those who had just “misbehaved in class”. “The correctional system is building a negative and self-reinforcing social network,” he wrote pointing out society should help these children “build positive relationships with role models,” he writes in the post.
Zuckerberg talks about the poverty he saw in the Southern states, and how “few people move to seek better opportunities elsewhere,” even though research has shown that it does help fight economic inequality.
“There’s a widely held myth that if people in other places just had better information they’d make better decisions. I’ve found this is generally wrong and the people I’ve met are rational. Now, it’s true we’re all missing some information that would help us make better decisions no matter where we live. But the people I’ve met have good reasons for the decisions they make based on their experiences and those of their friends and family,” he wrote.
The post also dwells on about how Facebook helped people connect, but that more than just adding friends, people also need to be “with people you should know — mentors and people outside your circle who care about you and can provide a new source of support and inspiration”.
Zuckerberg concluded his post with emphasis on relationships. “My hope is that we can help more people build positive relationships with people who expand their sense of possibility. I believe that if we do this, we will make progress on a lot of our greatest opportunities and challenges.”
