Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg Pledges to Spend More in War on Hate Speech
Facebook will see its biggest growth in money spent this year and next to combat hate speech, violent rhetoric and other content it deems offensive, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Tuesday.
Facebook will see its biggest growth in money spent this year and next to combat hate speech, violent rhetoric and other content it deems offensive, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Tuesday.
Zuckerberg said that despite the investment, Facebook won’t be “dialed in as well as everyone would like us to be” when it comes to several facets of security, including when it comes to nefarious forces trying manipulate election results.
The exec called the upcoming midterm elections “a real test” of the safeguards Facebook has already implemented since it infamously allowed “bad actors,” as Zuckerberg puts it, to post fake news designed to interfere with the election two years ago when Donald Trump won the presidency.
The CEO said with the elections next week that Facebook has seen and will see “all the good and bad that humanity can do,” but that the social media giant is rapidly getting better at making sure as few of its users as possible see the bad stuff.
He boasted, for example, of hundreds of pages designed to spread misinformation and chaos in the U.S. on Nov. 6 that were linked to Russia and Iran and were taken down.
Zuckerberg, who was speaking to Wall Street analysts after Facebook reported quarterly earnings, acknowledged the company he founded will “never be perfect” at safeguarding data and preventing objectionable material from spreading because there is no “silver bullet” to fix such problems.
User growth for the social giant has slowed, with Facebook reporting that it added just 1 million monthly active users (MAUs) in the U.S. while having 2.27 billion MAUs worldwide.