I really enjoyed this audio interview of Tim Cook by Michael Roberts.
They spent some time talking about the negative effects some kinds of social media have been having on society. At one point, Cook accurately claims that not only isn’t social media a part of Apple’s core business, but they are also developing ways to get us to spend less time on our devices. See Screen Time, for example.
From the transcript:
Our business is to give people tools that enrich their lives and allow them to create something that they couldn't create or do something or, you know, sort of transform themselves in some sort of way. We've never been into this, how long is somebody spending on our property? And let's try to figure out a way to make that as high as possible? How many clicks can we get? We're not into that business model.
The problem for society though is that there continues to be a huge demand for the products created by Facebook, Snapchat, etc.
It would have been interesting for Roberts to ask, independent of Apple’s business model, what role he thinks social media should play in society. What would Tim Cook do if he woke up tomorrow as Mark Zuckerberg? What does a privacy-first social media company look like? Can such a company even succeed?