Our responsibility now is to make sure that this doesn’t happen again

With demands to dump Facebook accounts growing worldwide, its CEO Mark Zuckerberg admits that the social media behemoth made mistakes. Breaking four days of silence, he talks to Laurie Segall, CNN’s Senior Technology Correspondent on how the company’s pla

Iwant to start with just a basic question, Mark. What happened? What went wrong? This was a major breach of trust, and I’m really sorry that this happened. You know, we have a basic responsibility to protect people’s data. And if we can’t do that, then we don’t deserve to have the opportunity to serve people.

So, our responsibility now is to make sure that this doesn’t happen again. And there are a few basic things that I think we need to do to ensure that.

One is making sure that developers like Aleksandr Kogan, who got access to a lot of information and then improperly used it, just don’t get access to as much information going forward. So, we are doing a set of things to restrict the amount of access that developers can get going forward. But the other is we need to make sure there aren’t any other Cambridge Analyticas out there, right, or folks who have improperly accessed data. So, we’re going to investigate every app that has access to a large amount of information from before we locked down our platform. And if we detect any suspicious activity, we’re going to do a full forensic audit. Facebook has asked us to share our data, to share our lives on its platform and wanted us to be transparent. And people don’t feel like they’ve received that same amount of transparency. Can they trust Facebook? Yes. One of the most important things that I think we need to do here is make sure that we tell everyone whose data was affected by one of these rogue apps, right? And we’re going to do that. We’re going to build a tool where anyone can go and see if their data was a part of this. So the 50 million people that were impacted, they will be able to tell if they were impacted by this? Yes. We’re going to be conservative on that. We may not have all of the data in our system today. Anyone whose data might have been affected, we’re going to make sure we tell them. And going forward, when we identify apps that are doing sketchy things, we’re going to make sure we tell people then, too. That’s definitely something I regret we didn’t do the time. And I think we got that wrong. And we’re committed to getting that right going forward. You guys knew this a long time ago, that this data was out there. Why didn’t you tell users? Don’t you think users have the right to know their data is being used for different purposes? Yes. And let me tell you what actions we took. In 2015, some journalists from The Guardian told us they had seen or had some evidence that data that app developer Aleksandr Kogan — who built this personality quiz app — had shared it and had sold that data to Cambridge Analytica and a few other firms. And that’s against the policies. You can’t share data in a way that people don’t know or don’t consent to. We immediately banned Kogan’s app. And, further, we made Kogan and Cambridge Analytica and the other folks with whom we shared the data — we asked for a formal certification that they had none of the data from anyone in the Facebook community, that they delete it if they had it, and that they weren’t using it. And they all provided that certification. So, why didn’t Facebook follow up? Why wasn’t there an audit then? Why does it take a big media report to get that proactive approach? Well, I don’t know about you, but I believe when people legally certify that they’re going to do something, they do it. But I think that this was clearly a mistake in retrospect. Was it putting too much trust in developers? I mean, I think it did. That’s why we need to make sure we don’t make that mistake ever again, which is why one of the things that I announced today is that we’re going to do a full investigation into every app that had access to a large amount of data from around this time, before we locked down the platform. And we’re now not just going to take people’s word for it and — when they give us a legal certification, but if we see anything suspicious, which I think there probably were signs in this case that we could have looked into, we’re going to do a full forensic audit. How do you know there aren’t hundreds more companies like Cambridge Analytica that are also keeping data that violates Facebook’s policies? Well, I think the question here is, are our app developers — whom people have given access to their data — doing something that people don’t want? Are they selling the data in a way that people don’t want, or are they giving it to someone that they don’t have authorisation to do? And this is something that I think we now need to go figure out, right? That’s got to be a really challenging. Because you talk about it being years ago, and then you guys have made it a bit stricter for that kind of information to be shared. Backtracking on it, it’s got to be difficult to find out where that data has gone and what other companies have shady access. Yes. As you say, the good news is we already changed the platform policies in 2014. Before that, we know what the apps were that had access to data. We know how much — how many people were using those services, and we can look at the patterns of their data requests. And based on that, we think we’ll have a pretty clear sense of whether anyone was doing anything abnormal. Do you have any scale or any scope of what you expect to find, anything in the scope of what happened with Cambridge Analytica where you had 50 million users? Well, it’s hard to know what we’ll find, but we’re going to review thousands of apps. So, this is going to be an intensive process, but this is important. I mean, this is something that in retrospect we clearly should have done up front with Cambridge Analytica. This is our responsibility to our community is to make sure that we secure the data.

If you told me in 2004 when I was getting started with Facebook that a big part of my responsibility today would be to help protect the integrity of elections against interference by other governments, you know, I wouldn’t have really believed that was going to be something I would have to work on 14 years later. Have you done a good enough job yet? I think what’s clear is that in 2016, we were not as on top of a number of issues as we should have, whether it was Russian interference or fake news. But what we have seen since then is, a number of months later, there was a major French election, and there we deployed some AI tools that did a much better job of identifying Russian bots and basically Russian potential interference and weeding that out of the platform ahead of the election. And we were much happier with how itwent.

So, you know, I think the reality here is that this isn’t rocket science. I mean, there’s a lot of hard work we need to do to make it harder for nation states like Russia to do election interference, to make it so that trolls and other folks can’t spread fake news. But we can get in front of this, and we have a responsibility to do this not only for the 2018 midterms in the US, which are going to be a huge deal this year, and that’s just a huge focus of us. But there’s a big election in India this year. There’s a big election in Brazil. There are big elections around the world, and you can bet that we are really committed to doing everything that we need to, to make sure the integrity of those elections on Facebook is secured. I can hear the commitment. But since I got you here, do you think that bad actors are using Facebook at this moment to meddle with the US midterm elections? I’m sure someone’s trying, right? I’m sure there’s, you know, V2 of all — a version two of whatever the Russian effort was in 2016. I’m sure they’re working on that, and there is going to be some new tactics that we need to make sure that we observe and get in front of. Are you specifically seeing bad actors trying to meddle with the US election now? Are you seeing anything new or interesting?

Well, what we see are a lot of folks trying to sow division, right? So, that was a major tactic that we saw Russia try to use in the 2016 election. Actually most of what they did was not directly, as far as we can tell from the data we’ve seen. It was not directly about the election but was more about just dividing people.

And, so they run a group on, for proimmigration reform, and then they’d run another group against immigration reform and just try to pit people against each other. And a lot of this was done with fake accounts that we can do a better job of tracing and using AI tools to be able to scan and observe a lot of what is going on. And I’m confident we’re going to do a much better job. Lawmakers in the US and the UK are asking you to testify. Everybody wants you to show up. Will you testify before Congress? The short answer is I’m happy to if it’s the right thing to do. You know, Facebook testifies in Congress regularly, on a number of topics, some high-profile, and some not. And our objective is always to provide Congress — this extremely important job, to have the most information that they can. We see a small slice of activity on Facebook, but Congress gets to have access to the information across Facebook and all other companies and the intelligence community and everything. So, what we try to do is send the person at Facebook who will have the most knowledge about what Congress is trying to learn. So, if that’s me, then I am happy to go. You are the brand of Facebook. You are the name of Facebook. People want to hear from you. That’s why I’m doing this interview. But, you know, I think there is — the question of congressional testimony is what is the goal. And that’s not a media opportunity, right? Or at least it’s not supposed to be.

The goal there, I think, is to get Congress all of the information that they need to do their extremely important job, and we just want to make sure we send whoever is best informed at doing that. I agree separately that there’s an element of accountability where I should be out there doing more interviews. And, you know, as uncomfortable as it is for me to do, you know, a TV interview, it’s, I feel that this is an important thing that as a discipline for what we’re doing, I should be out there and being asked hard questions by journalists. Knowing what you know now, do you believe Facebook impacted the results of the 2016 election? Oh, that’s, that is hard. You know, I think that it is, it’s really hard for me to have a full assessment of that. There were so many different forces at play. The organic posting that people did, the vote campaigns that we ran, the pages that both candidates ran, the advertising that they did, I’m sure all of that activity had some impact. It’s hard for me to assess how much that stacked up compared to all the campaign events and advertising that was done off of Facebook. Given the stakes here, why shouldn’t Facebook be regulated? I think in general, technology is an increasingly important trend in the world, and I actually think the question is more what is the right regulation rather than yes or no, should it be regulated? What’s the right regulation? Well, there are some basic things and I think that there are some intellectual debates. On the basic side, you know, there are things like ad transparency regulation that I would love to see, right? If you look at how much regulation there is around advertising on TV, in print, you know, it’s just not clear why there should be less on the Internet, right? You should have the same level of transparency required.

And, you know, I don’t know if a bill is going to pass. I know a couple of senators are working really hard on this. But we’re committed and we’ve actually already started rolling out ad transparency tools that accomplish most of the things that are in the bills that people are talking about today. People should know who is buying the ads that they see on Facebook. How has being a father changed — changed your commitment to users, your commitment towards kids Having kids has change me a lot. I think the most important thing by far was having the greatest positive impact on the world. Now I am building something that my girls can be proud of. That is my guiding philosophy at this point, like work on a lot of hard things during the day and go home and think will my girls be proud of what I did today. —CNN

I actually am not sure we shouldn’t be regulated. Technology is an increasingly important trend in the world, and I think the question is more what is the right regulation rather than yes or no, should it be regulated?

If you told me in 2004 that a big part of my responsibility today would be to help protect the integrity of elections against interference by other governments, I wouldn’t have really believed that