Mark Zuckerberg says Facebook is in fake news ‘arms race’ against Russia, Iran and China
Mark Zuckerberg says Facebook is in a fake news ‘arms race’ against Russia, Iran and China as he bids to stop electoral interference and misinformation about coronavirus and 5G masts
- Zuckerberg, aged 36, made the comments in a rare broadcast interview
- Facebook has been fighting campaigns from ‘state reactors’ across the globe
- He is ‘pretty confident’ Facebook will ‘protect the integrity’ of the US election
- He warned that fake news was circulating around 5G conspiracy theories
- Here’s how to help people impacted by Covid-19
By Alice Cachia For Mailonline
Published: 03:53 EDT, 21 May 2020 | Updated: 07:26 EDT, 21 May 2020
Mark Zuckerberg has revealed his social media giant Facebook is in a fake news ‘arms race’ against Russia, Iran and China.
The 36-year-old admitted the company had been ‘behind’ on identifying and fighting what he called ‘coordinated information campaigns’ during the row that erupted over state-sponsored political interference during the 2016 US election.
He also warned that fake news circulating around 5G conspiracy theories pose a ‘risk of immediate physical harm’ to the site’s users, and that his team was working urgently to remove the posts.
Dozens of arson attacks on 5G masts have swept across Britain with workers attacked as the conspiracy theory gains traction.
Zuckerberg said that Facebook is ‘quite advanced’ at ‘identifying and fighting these coordinated information campaigns’. He is pictured about testifying in Capitol Hill in 208 about the use of Facebook data to target American voters in the 2016 election
The comments came in a rare broadcast interview during which Zuckerberg defended his powerful position as the company’s controlling shareholder.
Facebook, which has an enormous distribution power for politics, said the fake news campaigns were a new ‘tactic’ in 2016 and the company has identified as many as 50 from around the world.
‘The reality here is we learned a lot about how politics works online since 2016 and there are a lot of different threats that we’ve worked hard to mitigate,’ Zuckerberg told the BBC.
‘For example one big area that we were behind on in 2016 – but I think now are quite advanced at- is identifying and fighting these coordinated information campaigns.’
He said the campaigns ‘come from different state reactors around the world, whether it’s Russia, or Iran or in some cases China’.
When asked if he was in an arms race with these nations, Zuckerberg admitted that ‘several nation states will try and run information campaigns to influence things’ as his company attempts to block them from interfering in elections.
He said it wasn’t his ‘place’ to weigh in on ‘how effective’ these campaigns and their impact would be, however.
‘We don’t want other governments to try and interfere in elections so regardless of how effective that is. I view it as our job to work with everyone we can to stop that from happening.
‘It’s a big deal if governments are trying to interfere in elections and I don’t want to say anything that implies that we’re not taking this extremely seriously.’
Zuckerberg said the company was tackling a spread of misinformation amid the coronavirus pandemic and said that Facebook would remove any content that would likely result in ‘immediate harm’ to users.
Zuckerberg revealed it had removed a claim from Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro that scientists had ‘proved’ there was a cure for coronavirus
In testimony to the US Senate in October 2017, Facebook said Russia-backed content reached as many as 126 million Americans on its platform during and after the 2016 vote.
It said it believed there were 120 fake Russian-backed pages which created 80,000 posts around the time of the campaign between Trump and former secretary of state Hillary Clinton.
Zuckerberg told senators in 2018 that Facebook was in a constant battle with Russian operators, and that ‘This is an arms race. They’re going to keep getting better’, when answering questions in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica data scandal.
He had been called to testify before Congress following the revelation that Facebook users’ data had been mined without consent and used for political advertising.
Cambridge Analytica then sought to sell the data of American voters to political campaigns including President Donald Trump and Ted Cruz.
What is the Cambridge Analytica scandal?
Consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica had offices in London, New York, Washington, as well as Brazil and Malaysia.
The company boasted it can ‘find your voters and move them to action’ through data-driven campaigns and a team that includes data scientists and behavioural psychologists.
In 2013, Cambridge professor Aleksandr Kogan used his app, This Is Your Digital Life, to ask 270,000 Facebook users questions about their personalities.
By answering them, the users granted Kogan access to not only their profiles but to those of their friends.
He subsequently sold that information to Cambridge Analytica for $51million.
Facebook changed its rules in 2014 to limit what data such apps could access.
A year later, the company learned that Kogan had sold his findings and contacted both him and Cambridge Analytica to tell them to delete the data which they promised to do.
In March, Facebook made its announcement that it had suspended Cambridge Analytica after being warned of looming media reports that claimed not all of the information had been destroyed.
Those reports, which were informed by the accounts of whistleblowers who worked at the firm, also revealed the true scale of the breach.
It was initially estimated that the firm was able to mine the information of 55 million Facebook users even though just 270,000 people gave them permission to do so.
But Facebook later since revealed the number was actually as high as 87 million.
The data firm suspended its chief executive, Alexander Nix, after recordings emerged of him making a series of controversial claims, including boasts that Cambridge Analytica had a pivotal role in the election of Donald Trump.
The same information is said to have been used to help the Brexit campaign in the UK.
Zuckerberg is ‘pretty confident’ that Facebook will be able to ‘protect the integrity’ of the upcoming 2020 US election, but conceded that ‘countries are going to continue to try and interfere’, he told the BBC.
He said the company has ‘played a role’ in protecting dozens of elections from around the world – despite the fact that a Princeton survey found Facebook was the fastest and biggest purveyor of misinformation in the US.
The company has resisted calls for sweeping privacy changes, however.
At the start of the year it announced it would not make changes to advertising policies – and would continue allowing political actors to send messages to specific groups.
Zuckerberg said he would not stop groups claiming the coronavirus infection was state-sponsored or connected to the launch of the new digital 5G network
Zuckerberg also revealed the company was tackling a spread of misinformation amid the coronavirus pandemic and that Facebook was removing content that could cause ‘immediate harm’ to users.
He also warned that conspiracy theories floating in the UK around 5G ‘misinformation’ amid the coronavirus pandemic had led to ‘some physical damage of 5G infrastructure.
‘We believe that that is leading to imminent risk of physical harm. We take down that content.
Facebook has ‘policies’ it uses to ‘stop the spread of misinformation’ and has removed ‘billions’ of fake accounts across its system.
Zuckerberg said hundreds of thousands of misleading posts had already been taken down.
One such claim, from Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro that scientists had ‘proved’ there was a cure for coronavirus, was removed.
‘If you’re saying something that is going to put people at imminent risk of harm we will take that down’, he added, and that ‘it doesn’t matter who said it’.
During the BBC interview Zuckerberg said: ‘If you’re saying something that is just wrong and is spreading quickly but isn’t going to put people at imminent risk, we don’t take that down but we stop it from spreading’
It would not, however, stop groups claiming the infection was state-sponsored or connected to the launch of the new digital 5G network.
‘If you’re saying something that is just wrong and is spreading quickly but isn’t going to put people at imminent risk, we don’t take that down but we stop it from spreading.’
He said Facebook would and should allow what the ‘widest possible aperture’ for freedom of expression on the internet.
Zuckerberg, who is the controlling shareholder in Facebook and worth around $80billion dollars, also defended his level of personal control over the platform in the BBC interview.
He said that ‘We’ve established an independent oversight board’ including judges, academics, and leaders of non-profits who have an ‘understanding of human rights’ so that people can ‘appeal if they think we are making a decision incorrectly on content’.
He added that this board would have the ‘final say’ and that ‘if they say if something needs to come down or needs to stay up, at that point it doesn’t even matter what I think.’
Facebook investors urged to vote against the company’s end-to-end encryption plans over fears they will make grooming on the platform invisible
Investors in the company have been asked to back a shareholder vote against the encryption move until Facebook has properly assessed the risks.
Activist shareholders and experts are demanding the tech giant study the chance of increased sexual exploitation of children if they start encrypting messages.
End-to-end encryption would mean only the sender and recipient of a message on the Messenger app could read or modify what has been sent in a conversation.
‘On balance, I believe working towards implementing end-to-end encryption for all private communications is the right thing to do,’ Zuckerberg wrote in a blog post in 2019.
The NSPCC has warned’End-to-end encryption of messages will blindfold Facebook to grooming and child abuse images being shared, and until and unless Mark Zuckerberg can guarantee the safety of children he should not press ahead with these plans.’
The shareholders hope to generate enough support and put pressure on the company directors to pause their plans. They will bring a vote on the issue at the Annual General Meeting on May 27.
