Mark Zuckerberg Calls for Greater Government Intervention in Controlling Content on the Internet

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Sierra Hurson, Journalist

In a recent article published by the Washington Post, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg explains that monitoring and controlling dangerous media content is too great a task to be left up to private entities alone. Zuckerberg believes that the government and regulators should contribute more to controlling what goes on the internet and the content that private entities produce. Zuckerberg wants the government to create new laws that cover four areas he views as problematic: “Election integrity, harmful content, data portability, and privacy.” These statements were made two weeks following the Facebook livestream of the New Zealand mosque attack in Christchurch, New Zealand. Zuckerberg said that many lawmakers take issue with the fact that Facebook in particular has “too much power over speech”, and he agrees with this concern. He says that the changes he wants to see with his own media platform are changes he wants to see spread to other platforms, eventually resulting in uniform restrictions and regulations of internet content. Zuckerberg outlined the following as things he wants to see implemented and that he believes the government should be enforcing: Common rules that all social media sites need to adhere to, enforced by third-party bodies, to control the spread of harmful content, all major tech companies releasing a report of transparency every three months, as they do with financial reporting, stricter global laws that protect honest elections, with universal standards for sites to identify political actors, standards to help control how campaigns target voters on the internet and utilize available data, and a “common global framework” that promotes continuity of these laws and the standardization of them across countries to ensure effectiveness.