[ad_1]
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Thursday morning wrote a long note on Facebook to share his thoughts on the social network's efforts to prevent any interference with elections via its platform.
What did he learn from this whole process? Zuckerberg wrote, "One of the important lessons I learned is that when you create services that connect billions of people across countries and cultures, you will see all that humanity can do. to see people trying to abuse these services in any way possible. "
Here are five excerpts from Zuckerberg's note:
Reaffirming his commitment
Zuckerberg emphasized the importance of the problems and challenges to solve them:
"These are incredibly complex and important issues, and this year has been intense. I bring the same attention and the same rigor to the resolution of these problems that I brought to problems of previous products, such as the transfer of our services to the mobile. These problems are even more difficult because people do not agree on what a good result is or acceptable compromises. With regard to free expression, thoughtful people come to different conclusions about the right balance. In terms of implementing a solution, some investors certainly do not agree with my approach of investing so much in security. "
Remove or not remove?
Apparently, faced with the controversy over the time it took Facebook to punish Alex Jones and Infowars, without mentioning them by name, Zuckerberg offered examples of deleted pages and those allowed to stay on the social network:
"One of the challenges we face is that the content that these pages often share does not violate the standards of our community, the rules that govern what is allowed on Facebook. In the example above [referring to fake accounts that were removed, which promoted a legitimate protest event and encouraged others to attend], the event would have been allowed under our policies, just as would encourage other people to attend. This was clearly problematic, however, and the violation was that the accounts involved were unauthentic. In another example, a campaign we found tried to sow division by creating pages for both immigration and immigration. Again, many articles on these pages were similar to the publications of legitimate immigration activists, but they were clearly problematic in the context of an inauthentic co-ordinated campaign.
Real names
Zuckerberg touted the benefits of Facebook's policy that people must use their real names:
"One of the benefits of Facebook is that we are committed to using your true identity. This means that we have a clear notion of what is an authentic account. It's more difficult with services like Instagram, WhatsApp, Twitter, YouTube, iMessage or any other service for which you do not need to provide your true identity. So, if the shared content does not violate any policy, which is often the case, and you have no clear idea of what constitutes a false account, it makes the application much more difficult. Fortunately, our systems are shared. So when we find bad actors on Facebook, we can also delete related accounts on Instagram and WhatsApp. And when we can share information with other companies, we can also help them remove fake accounts. "
Tighten the advertising policy or completely ban political ads?
Zuckerberg explained why Facebook has policies in place requiring pages showing ads related to issues to go through a verification process, adding that discussions have been taking place within the company to find out if 39, the ban on all political ads was the best:
"One of the challenges we faced in developing this policy is that most of the divergent ads published by the Internet Research Agency in 2016 were focused on issues such as the In order to catch this behavior, we had need a broad definition of what constitutes a problem posting. And because many ads deal with this type of problem, we now require that many legitimate businesses be verified, even when their ads are not really political. Since the verification process takes a few days, it's frustrating for many companies that rely on our ads to increase sales. In deciding this policy, we also discussed the opportunity to completely ban political ads. Initially, it seemed simple and attractive. But we decided not to do it because of the money – because this new auditing process is expensive, and we therefore no longer realize any significant profit on political announcements – but because we believe that it's not the same. we have to give the floor to people. We did not want to remove an important tool that many groups use to engage in the political process. "
It's not that Facebook
Zuckerberg emphasized the importance of coordinating and sharing information between platforms, as well as with law enforcement agencies:
"First, the bad actors are not limited to one service. So we can not address the problem in a vacuum. If a foreign player conducts a coordinated online information campaign, he will almost certainly use several different Internet services. And beyond that, it's important to remember that attempts to manipulate public opinion are not the only threat we face. Traditional cyberattacks remain a major problem for everyone, and many democracies risk being attacked by critical election infrastructures such as voting machines. The more information we can share, the better each organization will be prepared.
He continued, "Secondly, only police services have access to certain critical signals, such as cash flow. For example, our systems make it much more difficult to create fake accounts or buy political ads outside the country. But it would still be very difficult, without further information, to know if a foreign opponent had created a company in the United States, sent him money, registered an authentic account on our services and bought advertisements in the United States. We may find this ourselves because there are often multiple ways to identify the wrong actors. However, this is an example where closer coordination with other organizations would be very useful. "
Source link
