In an op-ed for The Washington Post and Independent.ie, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg says that he believes that there needs to be “a more active role for governments and regulators” in order to counter broader threats to society, while balancing freedom of expression. He outlines four broad areas where he feels that new regulation is needed: data portability, election integrity, harmful content, and privacy.
Zuckerberg uses the op-ed to lay out his case for each of
the four areas, saying that “internet companies should be accountable
for enforcing standards on harmful content,” and says that there needs
to be “a more standardized approach” when it comes to taking down
harmful content across a variety of services. He suggests that
regulators could set standards for defining what constitutes harmful
content, and the guidelines for removing it from online platforms.
For elections, he outlined the steps Facebook has taken to improve elections, such as new disclosure rules for political ads and searchable databases (although there have been some stumbles along the way) for such ads, but notes that there is a lot of grey area when it comes to determining what is an ad and what isn’t (again, running into problems).
He points out that existing laws that deal with political spending is
often centered on the candidates themselves, rather than organizations
that advocate for specific issues, and notes that laws need to be
updated to address “the reality of the threads and set standards for the
whole industry.”
When it comes to privacy regulation, Zuckerberg comes out
in favor of a comparable set of regulations like the European Union’s
General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and says that “it would be
good for the Internet if more countries adopted regulation such as GDPR
as a common framework.” He also says that such regulations should
“protect your right to choose how your information is used,” and should
include ways to punish companies when mistakes are made. “
Finally,
he notes that any such regulations should “guarantee the principle of
data portability,” and allow people to move their information from
service to service, and that there should be a common standard that
companies can use.
Zuckerberg’s op-ed comes after a bruising couple of years
for the company, and is a rare call from regulation-adverse Silicon
Valley. Moments like the Cambridge Analytica
scandal in 2017 led to intense questions about the role that social
media and the company play in society, and the influence it holds over
its users. More recently, the terror attack in Christchurch, New Zealand renewed debate about the role that the internet plays in radicalizing bad actors, terror, and hate groups.
This recent op-ed is an evolution from Zuckerberg’s comments almost exactly a year ago,
when he told various outlets that he wasn’t “sure we shouldn’t be
regulated” and felt that there was a role for regulators, provided it
was the “right” regulation, and that he felt that “guidelines are much
better than dictating specific processes.” His op-ed calls for specific,
standardized rules for internet companies to follow, and it seems that
Facebook’s experiences in that time has led to some soul searching about
its role in society and connecting people around the world, as well as
its own future, which Zuckerberg recently signaled could shift to focus on a more privacy-oriented platform that was more about private messaging and groups than public newsfeeds.
That soul searching has come alongside calls for more
regulation for companies like Facebook, as well as outright calls for
the company to be broken up, not only from outlets such as ourselves, but from presidential candidates as well,
who argue that they exert too much influence on society. Congress has
held numerous hearings about the matter, and while there have been plans and bill proposals for such a regulatory framework,
not much has come through yet. Despite that, the pressure on Facebook
is still mounting, and this latest op-ed seems to be a sign that
Facebook is acknowledging that the world that it’ll inhabit in the first
15 years of its life will be very different from the next 15.