Mark Zuckerberg called on governments to take responsibility for protecting users' data

The founder and president of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, wants an international regulation for the Internet in which governments take over, not private companies, concerning data protection, political information and content evaluation.

In a column published Sunday by several newspapers around the world, Zuckerberg – who has been the subject of controversy in recent years because of confidentiality issues and manipulation of its social network – called for "redoing the rules to guarantee the good ".

Facebook and other Web giants have long resisted government intervention, but the social network has changed its position in the face of growing regulatory demands.

"We need a more active role of governments and regulations", says Zuckerberg, making the new European data protection regulation a possible benchmark in this area.

"If we started today from the beginning, we would not expect a company to make those decisions itself," he adds. As he argues, political regulation in this area could provide the basic framework on which companies could evolve.

This regulation, he continued, should be general to be effective, so that the different social networks and applications with which content can be shared must follow the same rules.

"One idea would be for independent bodies to establish standards for measuring business compliance"he explains.

Zuckerberg believes new regulations are needed four areas: harmful content, election protection, privacy and data portability.

Criticisms of Facebook have been renewed in all four respects, from hate speech on the platform and the recent live broadcast of attacks on mosques in New Zealand, until the end of the day. to the use of the network to interfere in the elections of the foreign and the questions on their collection of data of private users.

In the field of political information, Facebook has already introduced "significant changes" as a result of scandals such as the latest US presidential election, says its president, but adds that "it is not There is no unified standard "to measure all networks with the same scale

Governments should punish offenses, he added, because Facebook can veto an actor, but only governments are able to "impose real sanctions."

The column is published in the American newspaper Washington Post, in German Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, in British Independent Sunday and in French Sunday Diary.

(With information from EFE and AFP)