CAMBRIDGE, MASS. — Speaking at the MIT commencement on Friday, June 8, Facebook (FB) COO Sheryl Sandberg told students to be “clear-eyed optimists.” She urged them them to continue building technology that supports “equality, democracy, truth and kindness” while also “looking around corners, and throwing up every possible roadblock against hate, violence, and deception.”
“It’s not enough to be technologists. We have to make sure that technology serves people,” she said, in a speech titled “Technology needs a human heartbeat.”
She added: “It’s not enough to have a good idea — we have to know when to stop a bad one.”
Sandberg’s speech comes as Facebook faces intense scrutiny from lawmakers and the public after a series of scandals involving data-privacy concerns including the Cambridge Analytica scandal, promotion and amplification of fake news, Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, and the platform’s destabilizing and unintended consequences around the world.
Most recently, Facebook found itself again in scandal this week when it revealed that a software bug set posts for “public” even when they were meant only for Facebook friends.
“I am proud of what Facebook has done — the connections people have created,” said Sandberg, referencing social causes like the Women’s March and Black Lives Matter, as well as small business use. “But at Facebook we didn’t see all the risks coming, and we didn’t do enough to stop them.”
Sandberg referenced the similarities between Facebook and the radio, quoting journalist Anne O’Hare McCormick’s 1932 remarks about whether the radio explained the “furious fence-building, the fanned-up nationalisms, the angers and neuroses of our time.”
“When everyone can share, some share lies,” she said. “When everyone can organize, some organize against the things we value most.”
Sandberg: ask “should we” as well as “could we”
To the graduates, she advocated for both optimism and realism when it comes to the technologies some of these graduates will no doubt create. MIT, one of the world’s premiere institutions of tech, counts many notable graduates from the Koch brothers to astronaut Buzz Aldrin as graduates.
Sandberg noted that technology changes faster than society, making this process difficult and requiring graduates to be active observers of these changes.
“Many of you will work on technologies that will change the way we live and work,” she said. “We have a duty of care.’
Sandberg’s remarks come as Facebook attempts to deal with the fallout from its lack of foresight into how its technology might be misused.