Mark Zuckerberg: The Kara Swisher interview

Yesterday, I motored my Ford Fiesta down to Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., to interview CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg.

I had not done a formal interview with Zuckerberg since he appeared at our D: All Things Digital conference in 2010, when the company was in its early days. Now, Zuckerberg was ensconced in a massive building with a garden on the roof, part of an even larger campus that sprawled all over and was still growing.

I just got this email from Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg, clarifying remarks he made in a Recode Decode podcast interview I did with him yesterday.

First, read it in its entirety:

Some people think Facebook has grown so big that the government should step in and break the company up. Not surprisingly, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is not one of those people.

The Facebook founder has argued before that Facebook isn’t a monopoly because it has a lot of competitors. But now Zuckerberg has another argument: Breaking up Facebook would be bad for America because it would clear the way for Chinese tech companies — which don’t have traditional American values — to step in and dominate.

Facebook wants to rid itself of so-called “fake news,” and Infowars, the far-right site that often promotes appalling conspiracy theories, is one of the most egregious purveyors of fake news, including insisting that the Sandy Hook shooting of school children was staged.

That’s why a lot of people were confused last week when Facebook said it wouldn’t ban a site like Infowars, even though it acknowledged the service often shares “conspiracy theories or false news.”