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Mark Zuckerberg: OK, Fine, Regulate Facebook

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerbergwhose company has blundered its way into controversies over everything from user privacy and data breaches to amplification of extremist content and literal genocide as of lateresponded to growing criticism of the tech sector by calling for more outside regulation in an op-ed in the Washington Post on Saturday.

Zuckerberg broke down the areas where he is now saying regulation could be helpful into four sections: harmful content, election integrity, privacy, and data portability.

One idea is for third-party bodies to set standards governing the distribution of harmful content and to measure companies against those standards.

Regulation could set baselines for whats prohibited and require companies to build systems for keeping harmful content to a bare minimum.

Seeing as it took Facebook years to concede that white nationalism and white separatism are actually the same thing as white supremacy, independent oversight of content decisions is probably not that bad an idea.

Online political advertising laws primarily focus on candidates and elections, rather than divisive political issues where weve seen more attempted interference.

Notably, at least in the U.S., these kinds of changes would entail a massive overhaul of campaign finance and disclosure laws that is unlikely to emerge for years, if it does anytime in the visible future.

Theres also the fact that the company has historically tried its best to be exempt from ad disclosure rules, and has generally been muddled in ethical issues around ads, like how the Department of Housing and Urban Development just slapped it with charges of enabling housing discrimination.

He also called for data portability, which he described as free flow of information between servicesthough he alluded to Facebook Login as an example, which is really more a way the company has extended its tracking tendrils across the web than anything about safeguarding user rights:

The rules governing the internet allowed a generation of entrepreneurs to build services that changed the world and created a lot of value in peoples lives.

Original article
Author: Tom Mckay

We come from the future.

Tom Mckay has recently written 7 articles on similar topics including :
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