The chief executive officer of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, has canvassed the need for new global regulations governing the internet.
Specifically, he recommended tough rules on hateful and violent content, election integrity, privacy and data portability, among other regulatory imperatives.
In a statement that was published as an op-ed in some newspapers, the Facebook chief said the company was seeking regulations that would set baselines for prohibited content and require companies to build systems for keeping harmful content to a minimum.
He said: “We have a responsibility to keep people safe on our services. That means deciding what counts as terrorist propaganda, hate speech and more.
“We continually review our policies with experts, but at our scale we’ll always make mistakes and decisions that people disagree with”, Zuckerberg added.
Analysts believe his latest comments mark his most visible effort so far to shape the discourse around the way the company collects information, uses and disperses it to internet users globally.
It would be recalled that Facebook had been at the centre of several probes by various governments in recent times after news broke about a year ago that it allowed the personal data of millions of internet users to be shared with political consultancy Cambridge Analytica.
Earlier this month, the company came under vitriolic attacks for its delayed dropping a live video of a shooting in New Zealand and subsequently allowing it to be circulated across the internet.
In addition, millions of users also had personal information accessed via a recent breach.
This is even as lawmakers, over the years, have focused greater scrutiny on the company and its immense influence, asking its executives, including Zuckerberg, to testify before the Congress to explain the proliferation of misinformation, hate speech and election manipulation on the platform.
In his latest post, Zuckerberg proposes that “regulation could set baselines for what’s prohibited and require companies to build systems for keeping harmful content to a bare minimum.”
Experts in the tech industry have long maintained that provision of Section 230 of the US Communications Decency Act, which exempts companies from being liable for user-generated content, was crucial to its ability to operate open platforms.
