Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg makes fresh call for global internet rules

Facebook’s CEO has called for global privacy rules as he accepts self-regulation has failed.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg before a joint hearing of the a US Senate committee in 2018. Picture: AFP

Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg has called for global guidelines on harmful content and privacy, admitting the tech giants cannot be trusted to write their own rules.

The executive, whose company is still dogged by controversies over privacy and is facing fines of up to $US5 billion ($7bn) from the US Federal Trade commission, has conceded on an earnings call that governments should bear the responsibility for regulating the tech giants, who have failed at self-regulating.

“If the rules for the internet were being written from scratch today, I don’t think people would want private companies to be making so many decisions around speech, elections and data privacy without a more robust democratic process,” Mr Zuckerberg said.

“For harmful content, I think there should be a public process for determining what’s allowed and required for keeping harmful content to a minimum that could be through government or industry but having common standards is critical since people use so many different services to share content.”

Mr Zuckerberg said for elections there have long been laws defining what is political advertising, but updates are needed to better reflect today’s threats, like interference in elections.

Facebook was widely blamed for its role in Russia’s attempts to meddle in the 2016 US presidential election, which resulted in Donald Trump becoming president.

“Those threats are often not covered by today’s laws and I think we’d be better off if companies didn’t define those policies themselves,” Mr Zuckerberg said.

It was a tumultuous quarter for Facebook, which is facing the multi-billion dollar FTC fine for sharing user data with Cambridge Analytica as well as an increase in scrutiny from regulators, including in Australia, with the ACCC probing Facebook and Google this year and flagging the creation of a new regulator as well as an examination of the social networks’ secretive algorithms.

The CEO outlined plans to get ahead of the issue, elaborating on Facebook’s new “privacy focused vision for the future of social networking”.

“The basic idea here is that in our lives, we have public spaces like that Town Square and private spaces like our living rooms and our digital lives we also need both public and private spaces. For the last 15 years, Facebook and Instagram have become the digital equivalent of the Town Square, we can do almost anything you want with lots of people at once,” he said.

“I believe that there is an even bigger opportunity with the digital living room to build a platform focused on privacy. We all need to communicate privately and this service could be even more important in our lives. So I think that we should focus our efforts on building this privacy focused platform.

“Our plan is to build this the way we’ve developed WhatsApp, focused on the most fundamental and private use case messaging, make it a secure as possible with end-to-end encryption and then build more ways for people to interact on top of that.”

Despite the controversies, investors sent shares in Facebook up more than 10 per cent to $US200.50 in after-hours trade, meaning the company has largely recovered from its share price hit last year.

Last month, I said that a fine in the low billions of dollars would amount to a slap on the wrist for Facebook.

Tonight, we learned that’s how Wall Street sees it too - as a slap on the wrist.

If the FTC won’t act, Congress has to. https://t.co/rkrS4XfaGY

— David Cicilline (@davidcicilline) April 24, 2019

Democratic congressman Davic Cicilline, who chairs the US House of Representatives Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on antitrust issues, said on Twitter that Facebook was “a repeat offender” and called for an FTC response “strong enough to prevent future violations.”

“A fine in the low billions of dollars would amount to a slap on the wrist for Facebook. Tonight, we learned that’s how Wall Street sees it too — as a slap on the wrist. If the FTC won’t act, Congress has to,” he said.

Additional reporting: Reuters.