Mark Zuckerberg calls on governments to be "more active" to regulate the Internet

Facebook continues to sail in stormy seas. The scandal of filtering and the use of private data from Cambridge Analytica have added other privacy issues, flaws in the platform and even new legislation in Europe that will have to pay the media for its content.

How does your CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg react? Instead of one mea culpa he preferred to look for other culprits: Governments. The creator of the social network wrote a column of opinion in which he asked for an international regulation for the Internet with an active role of governmentsand not private companies, around privacy, political information, content evaluation and data portability.

In the text, published in his official report and reproduced in several newspapers around the world, Zuckerberg – the same one who played a leading role in the controversies over the problems of confidentiality and manipulation in his social network – entitled "redo the rules of the Internet to ensure good"

"We need a more active role on the part of governments and regulations," said Zuckerberg, citing as an example the new European data protection regulation.

In his opinion, you can not expect a private company that must evaluate the political content and even decide if it should be blocked.

"If we started today from the beginning, we would not expect a company to make those decisions itself," he added. In other words: He washed his hands. For him, the blame lies not with his company but with the governments.

A political settlement in this area could be the basic framework on which companies could evolve, explained the founder of the largest social network.

"One idea would be for independent organizations to set standards for measuring business compliance," he said. Zuckerberg believes that new regulations are needed in four areas: harmful content, election protection, privacy and data portability.

Facebook has remained in the crosshairs in these four aspects, since the hate speech on the platform and the recent live broadcast of attacks on mosques in New Zealand, the use of the network for s & # 39; 39, interfere in the elections of the foreigner with questions about their collection of data of private users.

"Governments should impose offenses," he said, 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.