Zuckerberg urges global content rules for big tech

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg says Silicon Valley tech giants can’t be relied on to write the rules.

Mark Zuckerberg wants global rules for big tech.

Facebook founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has conceded the Silicon Valley tech giants cannot be trusted to write their own rules, as he stepped up calls for global guidelines on harmful content.

The executive, whose company is still dogged by controversies over privacy and is facing fines of up to $US5 billion ($7.1bn) from the US Federal Trade Commission for data and privacy breaches, said on an earnings call yesterday that governments should bear the responsibility for regulating the tech giants.

The comments come amid fierce criticism that social media and search majors including Facebook to Google have been allowed to grow unchecked and have turned a blind eye to violent and extremist content running on their platforms. There are also growing concerns over the volume of personal data sucked up and used by the tech players, often unknown to users.

“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 on an earnings conference call yesterday.

“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 that in elections there had long been laws defining political advertising, but updates were needed to better reflect today’s threats, such as interference in votes.

Facebook was widely blamed for Russia’s meddling in the 2016 US election, ahead of 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 a multi-billion-dollar fine from the US for sharing user data with Cambridge Analytica as well as an increase in scrutiny from regulators.

This includes the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission 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 chief executive 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 in 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.

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

In its quarterly results Facebook set aside $US3bn for an expected fine from the US Federal Trade Commission over privacy issues, cutting into the social-media giant’s profits even as its underlying business remained strong.

Facebook posted $US15.08bn in revenue in the March quarter, up 26 per cent from $US11.97bn in the same period last year, but profits of only $US2.43bn in the first quarter, as the one-time reserve cut in.

US regulators have been probing whether Facebook violated terms of an earlier consent decree when data of tens of millions of its users was transferred to Cambridge Analytica, a data firm that did work for the campaign of the US President.

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

Analysts doubt whether the company can actually pull off its change of direction, though many still rate the stock a “buy”.

Charles Sturt University course director Travis Holland said: “Facebook isn’t moving this direction just because it feels like doing so. There are both legal and user-base reasons. (Europe’s) GDPR has in part forced their hand toward default encryption while there has been a huge uptake of messaging services like the Facebook-owned WhatsApp, Apple’s iMessage, and Snapchat, all of which are about one-to-one or small-group conversations.

“Facebook’s history of data use and abuse would suggest good reasons to be cautious about what implications these changes could have for users, but in general it is encouraging to see them acknowledge the need to change what they’ve been doing.”

He said Mr Zuckerberg’s note mentioned that the company “won’t store sensitive data in countries where it might be improperly accessed”, which could be taken as a reference to Australia’s Assistance and Access Bill — passed last year — which forces companies to break encryption.

Social media expert and RMIT lecturer Lucio Ribeiro, told The Australian that Facebook’s motives were selfish.

“My opinion is that the high costs of compliance to government standards will actually firm even further Facebook as a monopoly, cutting out any entrant and competitor who doesn’t have the capital to invest on costs of governance,” he said.

“Don’t misguide Mark Zuckerberg and company as ‘reformed’ good citizens, they still have the old deceiving mindset. The legislation means big companies like Google and Facebook are more dominant than ever in their markets.”

RBC Capital analyst Mark Mahaney said it would take time for the company to earn back trust. “We do not believe that messaging encryption and data portability really decentralises control of individuals’ data from Facebook,” Mr Mahaney said.

Tom Sulston, from Digital Rights Watch, said Mr Zuckerberg was correct in saying governments had failed to build sufficiently robust regulations to look after citizens’ privacy.

“This is a good thing for him to be asking for, and he’s welcome to join the chorus of people and institutions that have been asking for better regulation of internet companies,” he said.