Zuckerberg sees need for social media regulation

UNITED STATES: Facebook should be regulated, co-founder Mark Zuckerberg has said after apologising for the leak of 50 million users’ data to a British company accused of interfering in elections.

Asked if he was worried by pressure from governments, he said: ‘‘I actually am not sure we shouldn’t be regulated ... in general, technology is an increasingly important trend in the world. I think the question is ‘what is the right regulation?’ rather than ‘yes or no, should we be regulated?’.’’

The Kremlin targeted Facebook users with pro-Trump propaganda during the US presidential election campaign in 2016. Investigators are looking into whether the data of 50 million users obtained without their knowledge by Cambridge Analytica may have also been used by the Trump campaign, and whether there was Russian state involvement.

Zuckerberg said he was convinced that ‘‘bad actors’’ were already using Facebook to try to manipulate the US midterm elections this year, just as Russia meddled in the 2016 presidential race.

However, he insisted that Facebook was doing much more to combat the efforts of ‘‘nation states’’ to interfere in elections than it did in 2016, and said the congressional elections in November were a ‘‘huge focus for us’’.

‘‘I’m sure that there’s V2, version two, of whatever the Russian effort was in 2016, I’m sure they’re working on that and there are going to be some new tactics.’’

In 2016, he said, Facebook was ‘‘not as on top of a number of issues as we should have [been], whether it was Russian interference or fake news’’.

Since he founded the company as a 19-year-old Harvard undergraduate in 2004, he had ‘‘probably launched more products that have failed than most people will in their lifetime’’, he added.

‘‘I started this when I was so young and inexperienced. I made technical errors and business errors. I hired the wrong people. I trusted the wrong people.’’

Facebook was doubling the number of staff working on security, Zuckerberg said, and aimed to have 20,000 people by the end of this year. It had also improved its technology to address threats. That investment began to pay off with the French presidential election last year, in which Facebook ‘‘deployed some AI [artificial intelligence] tools that did a much better job of identifying Russian bots and basically Russian potential interference and weeding that out of the platform’’, he said.

The problem in 2016 was that the scale of the threat was hard to predict, he said. ‘‘If you had asked me when I got started with Facebook if one of the central things I’d need to work on now is preventing governments from interfering in each other’s elections, there’s no way I thought that’s what I’d be doing.’’

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