Guardian interview with Craig Newmark of Craigslist

and there is a lot going on in this interview. Here are a few gems:

• regarding Mark Zuckerberg and Russian Facebook: “I have no idea what he’s done personally. I focus on how we all work on this together. It’s all hands on deck. People need to enlist much like in the US after the attack [on Pearl Harbor] in December of 1941, much like people during the Battle of Britain. There are foreign adversaries who’ve come out, published their public statements and say that they’re at war with us.” [Not going to happen]
• On fake news: “People in mainstream media can just do things like fact-checking. They could avoid giving airtime or space to people they know routinely disinform and they can just avoid amplifying disinformation.” [easy! *facepalm*]
• On living in Britain: “I spent some time in Edinburgh last year and I now really like haggis. I’ve also acquired a taste for Scotch whisky.” [scotch yes, but haggis?]
• On destroying the newspaper business: “I found economists and industry analysts [who have looked] at the numbers – they adjust for inflation, household growth and all that – and they say that there’s two things that happened in the early 50s, one of which was TV news, and from there [we have seen] a straight-line decline in newspaper circulation revenues, accelerated 10 years ago by the advent of the platforms.” [complete falsehood]
• On bullshit twitter wars: “Americans are much more reasonable and moderate than what you might guess when you see a little Twitter war. But I’m guessing that the purpose of many Twitter wars is to polarise people and, in fact, we’ve seen that happen because you can often trace some of the fighting groups to the same location. Outrage is profitable. Most of the outrage I’ve seen in the online world – I would guess 80% – someone’s faking it for profit.” [agree]