Highlights & transcript from Zuckerberg's 20K-word ethics talk

Mark Zuckerberg says it might be right for Facebook to let people pay to not see ads, but that it would feel wrong to charge users for extra privacy controls.

Talking to Harvard Law and computer science professor Jonathan Zittrain on the campus of the university he dropped out of, Zuckerberg managed to escape the 100-minute conversation with just a few gaffes.

Zittrain swiftly reminded him thats exactly what Facebook Portal is, and Zuckerberg tried to deflect by saying Portals recordings would be encrypted.

The CEO touched on his borderline content policy that quietly demotes posts that come close to breaking its policy against nudity, hate speech etc that otherwise are the most sensational and get the most distribution but dont make people feel good.

On working with governments, Zuckerberg explained how incentives werent always aligned, like when law enforcement is monitoring someone accidentally dropping clues about their crimes and collaborators.

The government and society might benefit from that continued surveillance but Facebook might want to immediately suspend the account if it found out.

He discussed how while many people fear how encryption could mask illegal or offensive activity, Facebook doesnt have to peek at someones actual content to determine theyre violating policy.

With Facebook rapidly building out a blockchain team to potentially launch a cryptocurrency for fee-less payments or an identity layer for decentralized applications, Zittrain asked about the potential for letting users control which other apps they give their profile information to without Facebook as an intermediary.

The problem is that if a developer was abusing users, Zuckerberg fears that in a fully distributed system there would be no one who could cut off the developers access.

So if youre thinking about commerce, that people have a higher expectation for privacy, and the question is: Is the right context for that going to be around an app like Facebook, which is broad, or an app like Instagram?

Original article