Facebook is having an end-of-year, company-wide meeting right now. One of its executives tried to rally employees by telling them: "We're at the center of what it means to be human."

Another executive: "It's not a short-term PR crisis."

I've been covering this company for a few years, so I can confirm the validity of the above statement.

Another fortune cookie aphorism from the meeting: "We cannot grade our own homework."

Facebook Chief Diversity Officer Maxine Williams: "One of the hardest moments the co. faced here is absolutely the witnessing of the killing of George Floyd and in the course of that, all of the complexity, the emotions, the experiences, the depths of what we had to deal with."

Another exec talked about how "transparency and accountability" are at the heart of the company. The execs speaking here have been pre-recorded and the video is just playing for employees.

Facebook VP Carolyn Everson: "Let's face it we play a major role in almost every geopolitical and societal issue. We reach over 3 billion people. With this comes enormous responsibility. We need third parties who can validate what we say we do is actually what we do."

Everson says the hardest moment for her this year was the killing of George Floyd and the "long overdue reckoning around racial injustice." She then immediately pivots to talk about the hardest thing from the "business standpoint" and says it was the #StopHateForProfit campaign.

Incredibly, not a single mention of Sweet Baby Rays (TM) during this meeting.

Chief Product Officer Chris Cox outlines important areas for FB: privacy (encrypting messenger), content (what do we leave up?), integrity, and competition ("sharing all the work" done to support and grow Instagram and WhatsApp).

Employees have posted this thread to Facebook's internal message board to inform their colleagues that I'm live-tweeting their meeting.

Hi everyone! Get in touch!

Had to take a break to handle some other stuff but if anyone wants to hear what happened inside the meeting here’s a snippet

I'm back to share the rest of the meeting highlights. FB CTO Mike Schroepfer commended the creation of the COVID vaccine and compared that tech advancement to what FB has done to improve messaging.

His transition: "But technological advancement goes beyond just vaccines!"

CTO Schroepfer commends the company's AI technology. He talks of a principle called "self-supervision" or a way for AI to train itself to detect hate speech and misinfo.

As a reminder, here's one departing Facebook employee said about AI last week.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/facebook-rules-hate-speech-employees-leaving

News folks are not going to love this. Some product manager announced internally a tool that FB is developing called "TL;DR". Basically, it will use AI to summarize long form articles and spit out bullet points so people don't have to read the full piece.

What could go wrong!

FB's TL;DR will apparently also be offering audio narration of full articles and a voice assistant to ask contextual questions about a piece. For example, you could ask "Hey Facebook, how many people will this vaccine help" and it supposedly would spit out an answer.

Other announcements:

-A tech called FaceGen to allow video chatting in bad connectivity environments. Basically allows FB to mimic the movements of your face.
-A "Universal" voice translator to allow people to communicate across different languages.

Re: the voice translator, here's your reminder that Facebook doesn't even have content moderators who speak all the languages of the countries it is used in.

Facebook also showed off "Horizon" a "new kind of social network" where people can hang out with their Avatars in VR.

CTO Schroepfer: "We all get the privilege of seeing the future, because we are making it."

A quote to look back on in a few years:

CTO Schroepfer: "We have to build responsibly to earn trust and the right to continue to grow. It's imperative that we get this right so that ppl around the world get all these amazing technologies... without experiencing the downsides."

To cap off, Facebook shows a demo of a neural sensor device.

CTO Schroepfer: It takes "neural signals coming from my brain, down my spinal cord along my arm, to my wrist, where this sensor that we are building detects them, interprets them, and allows me to control device."

CTO Schroepfer says he envisions use cases for the neural sensor like typing, or holding a virtual object, or telling a dinosaur to jump in a video game. "This is the future we're building," he says.

Facebook can't determine what content to moderate based on its own rules but it wants to make a device to read my brain.

Cool cool cool.

Sheryl Sandberg is up next. She commends FB employees for taking care of themselves during a trying year and the isolation of working from home. (She makes no mention of the third party contractors the company forced back into the office earlier this year during the pandemic.)

Sandberg invokes the names of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, commending the co for helping black businesses. (Feels like FB execs are co-opting their employees' own anger around racial injustice. FB's early inaction and allowance of Trump's posts caused massive internal anger.)

That's all I got for now.

Some Facebook execs are not happy I tweeted their meeting out, so feel free to support BuzzFeed News so I can continue to bring you this stuff until my job gets eaten up by Facebook's AI tools. https://support.buzzfeednews.com/