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Mark Zuckerberg has set out his vision of a more secure Internet through government intervention in an editorial published in the Washington Post this weekend.
Mark Zuckerberg: New rules are needed
In an editorial published in the Washington Post this weekend, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has proposed a roadmap for regulating the Internet in which he thinks the government, especially the US government, has a distinct role to play.
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"I think governments and regulators need to play a more active role," Zuckerberg writes. "By updating the rules for the Internet, we can preserve the best – people's freedom to express themselves and entrepreneurs to build new things – while protecting society from wider damage."
He went on to describe the four areas that he believes have been improperly delegated to Internet companies: protecting society from harmful content, electoral integrity, protecting privacy, and ensuring data portability.
Protect society from harmful content
Following Facebook's announcement this week of Facebook's removal and banning of all white nationalist or white separatist groups, Zuckerberg is attacking the problem of damaging content online.
"Lawmakers often tell me we have too much power over the floor and, frankly, I agree." – Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, Washington Post
"Lawmakers often tell me that we have too much power over the floor and, frankly, I agree," he writes. "I have come to believe that we should not make as many important decisions about speech by ourselves."
In addition to saying that Facebook is creating an independent body where users can appeal Facebook's content-related decisions, it goes even further and says that there must be an agreed standard for what constitutes a detrimental content, so that all Internet companies, not just Facebook, can: use this standard to control their platforms.
"It's impossible to remove harmful content from the Internet, but when users use dozens of different sharing services, each with their own policies and processes, we need a more standardized approach," he said. written.
Electoral Integrity
The giant polar bear in the room is the role of social media in efforts by external entities to try to disrupt the In the 2016 US presidential elections, Zuckerberg believes that it is up to the government to set a policy to be followed by Facebook and others with regard to the content posted on their platform during an election.
"Facebook has already made significant changes to political advertising: in many countries, advertisers must verify their identity before buying political ads," he wrote. "We've created a searchable archive that shows who pays for the ads, what other ads they have shown, and which audiences have watched.
"However, deciding whether an advertisement is political is not always easy. Our systems would be more effective if the regulation created common standards for auditing political actors. "
Confidentiality and data protection
Zuckerberg's third area of focus is the mosaic of standards in different jurisdictions for privacy and data integrity. Based on the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Zuckerberg writes that governments need to put in place a common global framework for confidentiality and data integrity.
"The new privacy regulations in the US and around the world should build on the protections provided by the GDPR. This should protect your right to choose how to use your information, while allowing companies to use the information for security purposes and to provide services. "
In this case, one of the benefits for Internet companies is the streamlining of regulations in many of the markets they serve, which reduces compliance costs; It is much easier to respect a law everywhere than to apply several different laws in several countries.
"I also think that a common global framework, rather than a regulation varying significantly from one country and one state to another, will ensure that the Internet does not not broken, that entrepreneurs can build products that serve everyone and that everyone benefits from the same protections, "he writes.
Ensure data portability
The last area where Zuckerberg needs to be involved is the transferability of data, the idea that your data is your data and that you should be able to move it from one service to another without restriction.
"True data portability should look more like how people use our platform to connect to an application than how you can download an archive of your information. But this requires clear rules on who is responsible for protecting information as they move from one service to another. "
Transferring data from one site to another is of real use, but also poses specific security issues. That said, it is not exactly as if private companies are vigilant guardians of users 'data about external hacking or other inappropriate access and use of their users' data. Even if these companies were able to secure this data, they did not seem to want to do it when it is cheaper to pay a small fine than to pay the real cost of securing the data collected.
Mark Zuckerberg opens regulatory negotiations
This last point can be applied to all areas of intervention proposed by Zuckerberg and beyond.
Until this year, Facebook and Zuckerberg said that the regulation of their services, which–if this is done by governments–could increase costs and possibly limit their access to lucrative opportunities, should be strictly carried out internally or through self-regulation of the industry. In the case of the GDPR, it was not so long ago, Zuckerberg claimed that the GDPR was doing well for Europe, but that other countries should not apply their own legislation to it.
With regard to electoral interference, it has not been six months since Zuckerberg refused to cooperate with a joint UK-Canada parliamentary inquiry into the spread of Fake News on social media platforms. Now, he wants the government to dictate the terms of the political discussion on social media.
In terms of harmful content, their recent moves to ban Facebook's Facebook white nationalist groups were a response to the horrific terrorist attack in New Zealand that was broadcast live on Facebook Live. -Algorithms to report inappropriate content, and there has not been enough content like barbarism in Christchurch to train the AI.
Even though the government explicitly told Facebook what to do because it was deemed harmful, Facebook admits that it relies on the computer to do most of the work and that its algorithms do not work. can not report a terrorist killing. The government's lack of clarity is therefore not the problem here; It's the inability of Facebook's algorithm to control the content that everyone could see at first glance was detrimental.
You could say that it's hard for computers to do that, and you'd be right. That's why computers should not do it, people should; but that would slow down the delivery of content on their platforms that they need to survive. This is the essential problem. These are not the policies; it is not the lack of regulation; it is the social media mechanisms themselves that are incorporated into the business models of these companies.
Zuckerberg may express his sincere feelings about these issues, having taken over much of Facebook's control and of his properties that he had delegated to others over the years. It may be finally the real Zuckerberg, and we may be witnessing a real change in the way Facebook works now that Zuckerberg is again in charge of everything. WHowever, we must not forget that the alternative to government regulation imposed by Facebook and other Internet companies is increasingly risky for them and their shareholders. For its part, Google is probably not happy to see how "antitrust enforcement" has evolved in recent times.
Faced with pressure from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and others, ranging from privacy violations to the exposure of children to potentially harmful media, Internet companies finally seem to see how quickly they lose control of the media. narration. endangering their results.
Facebook at least seems to come to the table to start negotiating the terms of their existence. We should welcome their willingness to cooperate with the officials – even if these openings are only cynical business decisions made to prevent harsher penalties – it would not have taken so long to arrive at this point and we should never forget why they are at the table.
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