Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has called for a more serious regulation of obnoxious online content. He also said that it was not for companies like his to decide what counts as legitimate free speech.
Making reference to China, Zuckerberg also called for caution as excessive control could constrict individual expression.
He made this know at the Munich Security Conference in Germany.
For some time now, social media companies like Facebook and Twitter have had to endure serious pressure to curb the spread of false information.
Also, Facebook in particular has been criticised for its policy on political advertising.
The company launched new policies for political advertising in the US in 2018 and globally the following year. These rules require political ads to display who had paid for them, and a copy of the ad is kept in a publicly-searchable database for seven years.
However, last week, Facebook declared it would exempt sponsored political posts by social media stars in its database. Posts by politicians are not are not always fact-checked as part of the company’s free speech policy either.
At the conference he said he supported regulation.
Zuckerberg said, “We don’t want private companies making so many decisions about how to balance social equities without any more democratic process.”
He urged governments to come up with a new regulatory system for social media, suggesting it should be a mix of existing rules for telecoms and media companies.
“In the absence of that kind of regulation we will continue doing our best,” he said.
“But I actually think on a lot of these questions that are trying to balance different social equities it is not just about coming up with the right answer, it is about coming up with an answer that society thinks is legitimate”
Mr Zuckerberg also admitted Facebook had been slow to recognise the development of co-ordinated online “information campaigns” by state actors like Russia adding that malevolent actors are also becoming better at covering their tracks by masking the IP addresses of users.
He also make it clear that Facebook is working towards countering this. He said that Facebook had a team of 35,000 people reviewing content and security on the platform. With assistance from AI, he said more than a million fake accounts are deleted every day.
“Our budget [for content review] is bigger today than the whole revenue of the company when we went public in 2012, when we had a billion users,” he said.
As part of his itinerary in Europe, Zuckerberg is expected to meet politicians in Munich and Brussels to discuss data practices, regulation and tax reform.
Facebook also stated that despite the challenges and fierce criticisms over issues like political advertising, the numbers of users on the its family apps- Facebook, Messenger, Whatsapp and Instagram – keeps rising.
At the beginning of this month, its popular chat app Whatsapp announced that it is used by two billion people worldwide, more than a quarter of the world’s population.
2 Comments
Good acrion
Good action, I support this.