Associated Press/Francois Mori
Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg, arrives to meet France's President Emmanuel Macron after the "Tech for Good" Summit at the Elysee Palace in Paris, Wednesday, May 23, 2018.
- Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg urged in a Washington Post op-ed for more regulation over the internet.
- He said Facebook has run into problems in four main areas: harmful content, election integrity, privacy, and data portability.
- He said privacy rules such as those in Europe should be adopted around the world.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is calling for more outside regulation in several areas in which the social media site has run into problems over the past few years: harmful content, election integrity, privacy and data portability.
In an opinion piece Saturday in The Washington Post, Zuckerberg says governments and regulators rather than private companies like Facebook should be more active in policing the Internet. He says privacy rules such as the General Data Protection Regulation, which took effect in Europe last year, should be adopted elsewhere in the world.
The piece comes days after Facebook was criticized after a shooting rampage in New Zealand that killed 50 people was broadcast live on the site. It it was extending a ban on hate speech to white nationalists.
Zuckerberg said that while companies should accountable for setting their own standards on harmful content, the issue becomes far more complex when people are using an array of different sharing services that all have their own varying standards. He said a more "standardized approach" was necessary.
"Lawmakers often tell me we have too much power over speech, and frankly I agree," Zuckerberg wrote. "I've come to believe that we shouldn't make so many important decisions about speech on our own. So we're creating an independent body so people can appeal our decisions."
Zuckerberg also called for major internet services to publish quarterly "transparency reports," just as they publish financial reports.
"Once we understand the prevalence of harmful content, we can see which companies are improving and where we should set the baselines," he wrote.
- Read more:
- Sheryl Sandberg says that Facebook might place restrictions on who can stream live video in the wake of the Christchurch attack
- Facebook secretly explored building bird-size drones to ferry data to people with bad internet connections
- Facebook rolls out political ad transparency across the EU, 2 months before an election that's vulnerable to Russian meddling
- Facebook is expanding its ad transparency efforts, but some advertisers worry it could hurt their ability to be competitive
