Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has defended the company’s actions after terror attacks, including the mosque attacks in Christchurch, were livestreamed on the social media site.
Zuckerberg stressed the company has to work harder to “amplify the good things that people do and to mitigate and remove as much of the negative as possible”, he said in an interview with George Stephanopoulos on ABC News.
Facebook was extremely criticized after the shooting in Christchurch was livestreamed on Facebook and the video was still available on a range of platforms for hours after the event.
While Zuckerberg said Facebook needs to build systems that can identify livestream terror events more quickly, he backed away from the concept of adding a delay to broadcasting videos.
Such a move would “fundamentally break what livestreaming is for”, Zuckerberg said.
“You’re not simply broadcasting, you’re communicating and people are commenting back. One of the things this flagged for me overall was the extent to which bad actors are going to try to get around our systems.”
Zuckerberg said he hasn’t seen information showing that social media has made acts of utmost violence more prevalent.
After Facebook was found to have been an outlet for Russian operatives to spread misinformation during the U.S.A. presidential election in 2016, Zuckerberg aforesaid he’s more confident regarding the next election in 2020.
“We’ve learned plenty since 2016 where obviously we were behind where we needed to be on defenses,” Zuckerberg said. “But the reality is that there’s not a single thing that we can do and say ‘alright we put this in place so currently they can’t even try to interfere.’ They’re always going to try.”
Zuckerberg additionally talked concerning regulation of technology companies. The chief executive called last weekend for new global regulations to control the internet, recommend overarching rules on hateful and violent content, election integrity, privacy and data portability.
“I assume regulation would be helpful, where it would be useful to spell out clearly what the responsibilities that we want corporations and people and governments to have,” Zuckerberg said within the interview. “There are a lot of decisions that I simply think people don’t want a single private company to be making.”
The chief executive said current laws relating to political advertising should not put the burden on private companies to set the rules.
“It’s not clear that we want private companies making decisions concerning free speech,” he said.