This time around, we’ll stop interference in america election, Zuckerberg says
23 May, 2020
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said Thursday he was “pretty confident” his company may help prevent attempts to influence the political outcome of the US presidential election later this season.
Zuckerberg told the BBC within an interview that the social networking was better ready to counter online misinformation campaigns but admitted Facebook was “behind” through the 2016 election which Donald Trump won.
“Countries are going to continue to try and interfere and we are likely to see issues like this but we've learnt a lot since 2016 and I feel pretty confident that people are going to be able to protect the integrity of the upcoming elections,” he said.
Zuckerberg described protecting against electoral interference as a “little bit of an arms race” against countries such as for example Russia, Iran and China.
“We don’t want other governments to interfere in elections, so it doesn't matter how effective that is I view it as our job to utilize everyone we can to avoid that from happening,” he added.
Facebook has been accused of helping Trump win through misinformation that was posted by foreign governments online.
In testimony to the united states Senate in October 2017, Facebook said Russia-backed content reached as much as 126 million Americans on its platform after and during the 2016 vote.
It said it believed there were 120 fake Russian-backed pages which created 80,000 posts around enough time of the campaign between Trump and former secretary of state Hillary Clinton.
Quizzed about Facebook’s approach to misinformation through the current coronavirus pandemic, he said the business would remove content that could result in “immediate harm” to any user.
Facebook took down a claim by Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro that scientists had “proved” there was a cure for coronavirus.
“That is obviously not true therefore we took it down. It doesn’t matter who says it,” Zuckerberg said.
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