Mar. 25-Mar. 31: Read All About It
This week, an internal memo at Facebook is leaked, full-grown adults attack the Parkland Shooting survivors-turned-activists, and the U.S.-North Korea summit gets an endorsement.
Welcome to the Zeitgeist Chronicle. Every weekend we catch you up on the past week’s most noteworthy current events. Sometimes it’ll be what everybody’s talking about, other times it may be something we’d like to bring attention to. Our goal is keep you informed enough to be able to have a conversation about any of these current events. This week:
Facebook Employees Weigh In On Facebook
This week, an internal memo written in 2016 by Andrew Bosworth, a Vice President at Facebook, was made public. What’s catching a lot of attention from the memo is the following excerpt:
We connect people.
That can be good if they make it positive. Maybe someone finds love. Maybe it even saves the life of someone on the brink of suicide.
So we connect more people
That can be bad if they make it negative. Maybe it costs a life by exposing someone to bullies. Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools.
And still we connect people.
This memo leak comes after a very tumultuous week for Facebook in which it was dealing with a public crisis of confidence over the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which it appeared that Facebook blatantly disregarded user rights to data privacy.
Bosworth has since distanced himself from the memo, saying that he wrote it in a way that would intentionally spark dialogue and that he doesn’t actually feel that Facebook priorities growth over its users. Mark Zuckerberg reiterated the same message, and voiced his continued support for Bosworth, calling him a “talented leader.”
While some employees within Facebook are not happy with the memo being leaked, others outside the company are taking it better than many would think, because the memo, which was written prior to the 2016 election, shows that Facebook has in fact been operating with thought and care regarding their role in civic society.
March For Our Lives
Things have gotten weird for the high school kids behind the March For Our Lives, because full-grown adults are now attacking them. First, Emma Gonzalez was called a “skinhead lesbian” by a House of Representatives Republican, and now David Hogg, who was accused of being a “crisis actor”, is now being made fun of, by Fox News host Laura Ingraham, for being rejected by colleges.
It’s a bad look when full-grown adults resort to these kind of tactics against high school kids, let alone high school kids who were survivors of a school shooting and are trying to do good. Ingraham herself is a parent, too. Several advertisers have since distanced themselves from Ingraham’s show, and Ingraham is currently taking time off from.
The United States-North Korea Summit
Earlier this month, in a surprising turn of events, Kim Jong Un and Donald Trump agreed to meet. A date has yet to be set, and with the volatility of these two men, there is still plenty of time for things to change, but we got two new developments this week. The first, was that Kim Jong Un left North Korea, for the first time six years, to visit President Xi in China, one of North Korea’s biggest allies. The second, which is significantly less serious, is that Dennis Rodman, NBA Hall-of-Famer, has officially endorsed the summit, with a tweet of Kim Jong Un wearing a MAGA hat. That sounds kind of ridiculous, but do keep in mind that Rodman is one of only three people on Earth who have met both Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un. He’s also the only one of those three to have played basketball with Michael Jordan, too. You can’t make this stuff up.
