Mark Zuckerberg at the Munich Security Conference in Germany called for a distinction between Facebook (social media) and media (traditional) organizations in implementing social media regulation. He believes posts on social media should be regulated by a similar but separate system from the traditional media organizations.
“I do think that there should be regulation on harmful content … there’s a question about which framework you use for this. Right now there are two frameworks that I think people have for existing industries – there’s like newspapers and existing media, and then there’s the telco-type model, which is ‘the data just flows through you’, but you’re not going to hold a telco responsible if someone says something harmful on a phone line. I actually think where we should be is somewhere in between.”
Having come under a lot of pressure and scrutiny alongside Twitter and Google since the 2016 election, Facebook has taken steps in ensuring that its platform is not used as a medium to propagate political misinformation.
Zuckerberg said Facebook now employs over 35000 people to monitor posts on social media, detect and delete fake accounts. It’s reported that this team deletes over a million accounts daily, many within minutes of their creation.
Since going public in 2012, Facebook has seen tremendous growth allowing it to expand both in manpower and reach from 1 billion users to now 5 billion users.
“Our budget is bigger today than the whole revenue of the company when we went public in 2012, when we had a billion users. I’m proud of the results but we will definitely have to stay vigilant.”