经济学人2019.5.4/Facebook’s future/part1

Facebook’s future

Facebook的将来

Mark Zuckerberg wants to build WeChat for the West

Mark Zuckerberg想要为西方世界打造一个类似于微信的聊天软件

It will revolve around turning the social network’s messaging services into something akin to a Chinese mega-app

它将以将社交网络信息服务为中心转变为类似于中国某大型APP模式

May 2nd 2019 | MENLO PARK AND SAN JOSE

IN HIS SPARE time Mark Zuckerberg likes to run. In 2016 Facebook’s boss pledged to cover 365 miles (587km) that year and, ever the overachiever, completed the challenge by July. He does not practise martial arts, but his almost discomfiting poise could lead you to mistake him for a master of something like aikido. That would be appropriate, for in his professional life Mr Zuckerberg is trying to turn his opponents’ energy against them.

闲暇时，马克·扎克伯格喜欢跑步。在2016年，Facebook的老板承诺在那一年完成365英里(587公里)的行程，并在7月前完成了挑战以至于还超过了预期。他不练武术，但他那令人不安的姿态可能会让你误以为他是合气道之类的高手。这将是应当的，因为在他的职业生涯中，扎克伯格正试图将对手的精力转为直面他们。

词汇

martial arts/武术

discomfiting/使困惑;使窘迫;使尴尬【词典推荐discomforting/令人难过的，令人不安的,键盘o,i很近，也许打错了。。。】

aikido/合气道

When in early March he announced that Facebook would follow a “privacy-focused vision for social networking”, complete with encrypted messages that even the firm cannot peer into, observers interpreted this as a defensive move. Some discerned a belated response to outrage over privacy abuses on the world’s largest social network. Others saw the plan to knit together its instant-messaging services, chiefly Messenger and WhatsApp, as a way to make the company harder to break up, as some American politicians demand. Others still spied a ruse to escape liability for violent user content, now that Facebook would no longer be able to read any of it.

3月初，当他宣布Facebook将遵循“以隐私为中心的社交网络愿景”，包括加密信息，甚至连公司都无法窥探到，观察家们将其解读为一种防御性举措。一些人发现，对于这家全球最大的社交网络侵犯隐私的愤慨，人们的反应来得太晚了（个人认为也许指棱镜门这种事）。另一些人则认为，整合其即时通讯服务(主要是Messenger和WhatsApp)的计划，是为了像一些美国政界人士所要求的那样，让公司更难分拆。另一些人仍然在寻找一个策略来逃避暴力的用户内容（自己加的，比如通过社交软件传播暴力信息）的责任，因为Facebook将不再能够阅读任何暴力内容。

词汇

Encrypted/把…编码；把…加密

Belated/迟来的；误期的

knit together/紧密结合

Ruse/策略，计策；诡计

Liability/责任；

All three rationales probably played a part. Yet the firm’s “privacy pivot” is perhaps better seen as an aikido-like redirection of detractors’ momentum. Mr Zuckerberg’s speech at his firm’s annual developer conference in San Jose on April 30th suggested as much. Far from retreating, he is limbering up for a new contest—to reinvent social networking, this time around messaging. “The future is private,” he declared grandiosely. Though he might not admit it in public, he seems keen to turn Facebook into a Western version of WeChat, the Chinese messaging app whose array of mobile services, from payments to filing court paperwork, has made it ubiquitous in China—even if his recent pledge to store user information only in countries that respect the rule of law is an implicit admission that he has given up on the Chinese market, where Communist minders insist that Western firms must keep all data locally.

这三种理论可能都发挥了作用。然而，该公司的“隐私重心”或许更能被视为一种面对诽谤者的势力，以一种合气道的形式将舆论转向（利于自己的一面）。4月30日，扎克伯格先生在San Jose举行的公司年度开发者大会上的演讲也说明了这一点。他非但没有退缩，反而在为一场新的竞争做准备——重塑社交网络，这次是围绕着即时通讯。“未来是私人的，”他庄严地宣称。尽管他可能不会在公共场合承认,他似乎急于把Facebook变成西方版的微信,中国移动服务消息传递应用程序的阵列,从付款到提交法院的文书工作,使其无处不在——即使他最近承诺只在尊重法治的国家存储用户信息，这也意味着他已经放弃了在中国市场的做法，————者坚持认为西方公司必须在本地保存所有数据。

词汇

Detractors/ 贬低者；诽谤者

Grandiosely/浮夸地；夸大地；宏伟地

Ubiquitous/普遍存在的；无所不在的

Implicit/  含蓄的；暗示的；盲从的