UPDATED 19:51 EDT / FEBRUARY 16 2020

POLICY

Mark Zuckerberg: Facebook should be treated differently from media companies

Facebook Inc. Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg told a conference in Germany Saturday that he believes online content should be regulated but Facebook itself should sit somewhere between a telecommunications company and a traditional media publisher when it comes to scrutiny.

Speaking at the Munich Security Conference in Germany as part of a planned trip to Europe that will also see him speak to European Union regulators on Monday, Zuckerberg (pictured) explained that Facebook is in a different category to content publishers and telcos.

“Right now there are two frameworks that I think people have for existing industries — there’s like newspapers and existing media and then there’s the telco-type model, which is ‘the data just flows through you,’ but you’re not going to hold a telco responsible if someone says something harmful on a phone line,” Zuckerberg said. “I actually think where we should be is somewhere in between.”

Zuckerberg didn’t spell out what level of regulation Facebook should face but did say that he supported state regulations in four fields: elections, political discourse, privacy and data portability. Repeating a theme he has used in the past, he added, “We don’t want private companies making so many decision-balancing social equities without democratic processes.”

Emphasizing that Facebook does take concerns about content seriously, Zuckerberg told the conference that the social networking giant now employs 35,000 people to review online content and implement security measures. Those teams along with the implementation of artificial intelligence now detect more than 1 million fake accounts each day, with the vast majority “detected within minutes of signing up.”

On Monday, Zuckerberg will meet with EU officials, including Executive Vice President for Digital Affairs Margrethe Vestager, to discuss policy issues going forward. Vestager previously discussed policy with Alphabet Inc. Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai and Microsoft Corp. President Brad Smith in January.

Likely at the forefront of the meeting will be a discussion on the EU’s proposed Digital Services Act. The law would hold tech companies such as Facebook liable for illegal content users upload to their platforms. The proposed legislation follows in the footsteps a ruling by the European Court of Justice in October that gave judges from member states the authority to order that Facebook take down defamatory content globally.

Photo: Time/YouTube

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