Mark Zuckerberg: The Internet needs new rules. Let’s start in these four areas

By Mark Zuckerberg

March 30

Mark Zuckerberg is founder and chief executive of Facebook.

Technology is a major part of our lives, and companies such as Facebook have immense responsibilities. Every day, we make decisions about what speech is harmful, what constitutes political advertising, and how to prevent sophisticated cyberattacks. These are important for keeping our community safe. But if we were starting from scratch, we wouldn’t ask companies to make these judgments alone.

I believe we need a more active role for governments and regulators. By updating the rules for the Internet, we can preserve what’s best about it — the freedom for people to express themselves and for entrepreneurs to build new things — while also protecting society from broader harms.

From what I’ve learned, I believe we need new regulation in four areas: harmful content, election integrity, privacy and data portability.

First, harmful content. Facebook gives everyone a way to use their voice, and that creates real benefits — from sharing experiences to growing movements. As part of this, 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.

Lawmakers often tell me we have too much power over speech, and frankly I agree. I’ve come to believe that we shouldn’t make so many important decisions about speech on our own. So we’re creating an independent body so people can appeal our decisions. We’re also working with governments, including French officials, on ensuring the effectiveness of content review systems.

Zuckerberg says Facebook's future is 'privacy-focused'

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on March 6 said the company would encrypt conversations on more of its messaging services and make them compatible. (Reuters)

Internet companies should be accountable for enforcing standards on harmful content. It’s impossible to remove all harmful content from the Internet, but when people use dozens of different sharing services — all with their own policies and processes — we need a more standardized approach.

One idea is for third-party bodies to set standards governing the distribution of harmful content and to measure companies against those standards. Regulation could set baselines for what’s prohibited and require companies to build systems for keeping harmful content to a bare minimum.

Facebook already publishes transparency reports on how effectively we’re removing harmful content. I believe every major Internet service should do this quarterly, because it’s just as important as financial reporting. Once we understand the prevalence of harmful content, we can see which companies are improving and where we should set the baselines.

Second, legislation is important for protecting elections. Facebook has already made significant changes around political ads: Advertisers in many countries must verify their identities before purchasing political ads. We built a searchable archive that shows who pays for ads, what other ads they ran and what audiences saw the ads. However, deciding whether an ad is political isn’t always straightforward. Our systems would be more effective if regulation created common standards for verifying political actors.

Online political advertising laws primarily focus on candidates and elections, rather than divisive political issues where we’ve seen more attempted interference. Some laws only apply during elections, although information campaigns are nonstop. And there are also important questions about how political campaigns use data and targeting. We believe legislation should be updated to reflect the reality of the threats and set standards for the whole industry.

Third, effective privacy and data protection needs a globally harmonized framework. People around the world have called for comprehensive privacy regulation in line with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, and I agree. I believe it would be good for the Internet if more countries adopted regulation such as GDPR as a common framework.

New privacy regulation in the United States and around the world should build on the protections GDPR provides. It should protect your right to choose how your information is used — while enabling companies to use information for safety purposes and to provide services. It shouldn’t require data to be stored locally, which would make it more vulnerable to unwarranted access. And it should establish a way to hold companies such as Facebook accountable by imposing sanctions when we make mistakes.

I also believe a common global framework — rather than regulation that varies significantly by country and state — will ensure that the Internet does not get fractured, entrepreneurs can build products that serve everyone, and everyone gets the same protections.

As lawmakers adopt new privacy regulations, I hope they can help answer some of the questions GDPR leaves open. We need clear rules on when information can be used to serve the public interest and how it should apply to new technologies such as artificial intelligence.

Finally, regulation should guarantee the principle of data portability. If you share data with one service, you should be able to move it to another. This gives people choice and enables developers to innovate and compete.

This is important for the Internet — and for creating services people want. It’s why we built our development platform. True data portability should look more like the way people use our platform to sign into an app than the existing ways you can download an archive of your information. But this requires clear rules about who’s responsible for protecting information when it moves between services.

This also needs common standards, which is why we support a standard data transfer format and the open source Data Transfer Project.

I believe Facebook has a responsibility to help address these issues, and I’m looking forward to discussing them with lawmakers around the world. We’ve built advanced systems for finding harmful content, stopping election interference and making ads more transparent. But people shouldn’t have to rely on individual companies addressing these issues by themselves. We should have a broader debate about what we want as a society and how regulation can help. These four areas are important, but, of course, there’s more to discuss.

The rules governing the Internet allowed a generation of entrepreneurs to build services that changed the world and created a lot of value in people’s lives. It’s time to update these rules to define clear responsibilities for people, companies and governments going forward.

Mark Zuckerberg’s Plans to Capitalize on Facebook’s Failures

By Sue Halpern

On Wednesday, a few hours before the C.E.O. of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, published a thirty-two-hundred-word post on his site titled “A privacy-focused vision for social networking,” a new study from the market research firm Edison Research revealed that Facebook had lost fifteen million users in the United States since 2017. “Fifteen million is a lot of people, no matter which way you cut it,” Larry Rosin, the president of Edison Research, said on American Public Media’s “Marketplace.” “This is the second straight year we’ve seen this number go down.” The trend is likely related to the public’s dawning recognition that Facebook has become both an unbridled surveillance tool and a platform for propaganda and misinformation. According to a recent Harris/Axios survey of the hundred most visible companies in the U.S., Facebook’s reputation has taken a precipitous dive in the last five years, with its most acute plunge in the past year, and it scores particularly low in the categories of citizenship, ethics, and trust.

While Zuckerberg’s blog post can be read as a response to this loss of faith, it is also a strategic move to capitalize on the social-media platform’s failures. To be clear, what Zuckerberg calls “town square” Facebook, where people post updates about new jobs, and share prom pictures and erroneous information about vaccines, will continue to exist. (On Thursday, Facebook announced that it would ban anti-vaccine advertisements on the site.) His new vision is to create a separate product that merges Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram into an encrypted and interoperable communications platform that will be more like a “living room.” According to Zuckerberg, “We’ve worked hard to build privacy into all our products, including those for public sharing. But one great property of messaging services is that, even as your contacts list grows, your individual threads and groups remain private. As your friends evolve over time, messaging services evolve gracefully and remain intimate.”

This new Facebook promises to store data securely in the cloud, and delete messages after a set amount of time to reduce “the risk of your messages resurfacing and embarrassing you later.” (Apparently, Zuckerberg already uses this feature, as Tech Crunch reported, in April, 2018.) Its interoperability means, for example, that users will be able to buy something from Facebook Marketplace and communicate with the seller via WhatsApp; Zuckerberg says this will enable the buyer to avoid sharing a phone number with a stranger. Just last week, however, a user discovered that phone numbers provided for two-factor authentication on Facebook can be used to track people across the Facebook universe. Zuckerberg does not address how the new product will handle this feature, since “town square” Facebook will continue to exist.

Once Facebook has merged all of its products, the company plans to build other products on top of it, including payment portals, banking services, and, not surprisingly, advertising. In an interview with Wired’s editor-in-chief, Nicholas Thompson, Zuckerberg explained that “What I’m trying to lay out is a privacy-focused vision for this kind of platform that starts with messaging and making that as secure as possible with end-to-end encryption, and then building all of the other kinds of private and intimate ways that you would want to interact—from calling, to groups, to stories, to payments, to different forms of commerce, to sharing location, to eventually having a more open-ended system to plug in different kinds of tools for providing the interaction with people in all the ways that you would want.”

If this sounds familiar, it is. Zuckerberg’s concept borrows liberally from WeChat, the multiverse Chinese social-networking platform, popularly known as China’s “app for everything.” WeChat’s billion monthly active users employ the app for texting, video conferencing, broadcasting, money transfers, paying fines, and making medical appointments. Privacy, however, is not one of its attributes. According to a 2015 article in Quartz, WeChat’s “heat map” feature alerts Chinese authorities to unusual crowds of people, which the government can then surveil.

Zuckerberg is quick to point out that his vision for this new Facebook is aspirational. It has not yet been built, and it is not certain that it can be built—at least in the way he imagines it—with across-the-board encryption. “I believe the future of communication will increasingly shift to private, encrypted services where people can be confident what they say to each other stays secure and their messages and content won’t stick around forever,” Zuckerberg tells us. “This is the future I hope we will help bring about.” By announcing it now, and framing it in terms of privacy, he appears to be addressing the concerns of both users and regulators, while failing to acknowledge that a consolidated Facebook will provide advertisers with an even richer and more easily accessed database of users than the site currently offers. As Wired reported in January, when the merger of Facebook’s apps was floated in the press, “the move will unlock huge quantities of user information that was previously locked away in silos.” ( As Privacy Matters recently noted on Twitter, Facebook’s data policy states, “We collect information about the people, Pages, accounts, hashtags and groups that you are connected to and how you interact with them across our Products, such as people you communicate with the most or groups that you are part of.”)

Zuckerberg also acknowledged that an encrypted Facebook may pose problems for law enforcement and intelligence services, but promised that the company would work with authorities to root out bad guys who “misuse it for truly terrible things like child exploitation, terrorism, and extortion.” It’s unclear how, with end-to-end encryption, it will be able to do this. Facebook’s private groups have already been used to incite genocide and other acts of violence, suppress voter turnout, and disseminate misinformation. Its pivot to privacy will not only give such activities more space to operate behind the relative shelter of a digital wall but will also relieve Facebook from the responsibility of policing them. Instead of more—and more exacting—content moderation, there will be less. Instead of removing bad actors from the service, the pivot to privacy will give them a safe harbor.

If “town square” Facebook is, as Zuckerberg and his associates like to say, “a neutral platform,” this new “living room” Facebook, where people gather in smallish, obscure groups, is likely to be a broadcast channel for all sorts of odious and malevolent ideas and behaviors. We’ve seen this already on WhatsApp. Last year, mobs in India were incited to kill more than two dozen innocent people after false rumors of a child-kidnapping ring were spread through the messaging app. As the New York Times reported at the time, “WhatsApp’s design makes it easy to spread false information. Many messages are shared in groups, and when they are forwarded, there is no indication of their origin.” (According to the Times, WhatsApp subsequently introduced new labels for forwarded messages, ran newspaper ads to warn the public about misinformation, and vowed to work more closely with police.) Instagram has also been an effective tool for spreading misinformation. According to data shared with the Senate Intelligence Committee last December, between 2015 and 2017, Russian propagandists working out of the Internet Research Agency generated posts that garnered a hundred and eighty-seven million interactions on the photo-sharing app, which was more engagement than they accomplished on either Facebook or Twitter. An encrypted Instagram will be a boon to trolls.

Mark Zuckerberg announces his firm’s next business model

If it works, the social-networking giant will become more private and more powerful

The first big overhaul for Facebook came in 2012-14. Internet users were carrying out ever more tasks on smartphones rather than desktop or laptop computers. Mark Zuckerberg opted to follow them, concentrating on Facebook’s mobile app ahead of its website, and buying up two fast-growing communication apps, WhatsApp and Instagram. It worked. Facebook increased its market valuation from around $60bn at the end of 2012 to—for a brief period in 2018—more than $600bn.

On March 6th Mr Zuckerberg announced Facebook’s next pivot. As well as its existing moneymaking enterprise, selling targeted ads on its public social networks, it is building a “privacy-focused platform” around WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger. The apps will be integrated, he said, and messages sent through them encrypted end-to-end, so that even Facebook cannot read them. While it was not made explicit, it is clear what the business model will be. Mr Zuckerberg wants all manner of businesses to use its messaging networks to provide services and accept payments. Facebook will take a cut.

A big shift was overdue at Facebook given the privacy and political scandals that have battered the firm. Even Mr Zuckerberg, who often appears incapable of seeing the gravity of Facebook’s situation, seemed to grasp the irony of it putting privacy first. “Frankly we don’t currently have a strong reputation for building privacy protective services,” he noted.

Still, he intends to do it. Mr Zuckerberg claims that users will benefit from his plan to integrate its messaging apps into a single, encrypted network. The content of messages will be safe from prying eyes of authoritarian snoops and criminals, as well as from Facebook itself. It will make messaging more convenient, and make profitable new services possible. But caution is warranted for three reasons.

The first is that Facebook has long been accused of misleading the public on privacy and security, so the potential benefits Mr Zuckerberg touts deserve to be treated sceptically. He is also probably underselling the benefits that running integrated messaging networks brings to his firm, even if they are encrypted so that Facebook cannot see the content. The metadata alone, ie, who is talking to whom, when and for how long, will still allow Facebook to target advertisements precisely, meaning its ad model will still function.

End-to-end encryption will also make Facebook’s business cheaper to run. Because it will be mathematically impossible to moderate encrypted communications, the firm will have an excuse to take less responsibility for content running through its apps, limiting its moderation costs.

If it can make the changes, Facebook’s dominance over messaging would probably increase. The newfound user-benefits of a more integrated Facebook might make it harder for regulators to argue that Mr Zuckerberg’s firm should be broken up.

Facebook’s plans in India provide some insight into the new model. It has built a payment system into WhatsApp, the country’s most-used messaging app. The system is waiting for regulatory approval. The market is huge. In the rest of the world, too, users are likely to be drawn in by the convenience of Facebook’s new networks. Mr Zuckerberg’s latest strategy is ingenious but may contain twists.

This article appeared in the Business section of the print edition under the headline"Facebook’s third act"

Vladimir Putin wants to stifle the internet

Google should not help him

Sometimes it seems as if Vladimir Putin’s presidency has been made for television. His bare-chested exploits on horseback, microlight flights with cranes and the fighting in Ukraine and Syria were planned with the cameras in mind. Having helped turn a little-known kgb officer into a patriotic icon, television has sustained him in power. But recently, there are signs that the spell of Russia’s gogglebox is weakening. Meanwhile, ever more Russians look to the internet for their news.

Russia’s state-controlled broadcast channels must now compete with social-media stars, YouTubers and online activists (see article). Over the past decade trust in television has fallen from 80% to below 50%; 82% of 18- to 44-year-olds use YouTube and news is its fourth-most-watched category. Some vloggers have audiences that dwarf those of the nightly newscasts.

Mr Putin’s government is attempting to gain control over social media through legislation, intimidation and new surveillance infrastructure. However, this needs the co-operation of Western internet platforms such as Facebook and Google, which owns YouTube. Increasingly, the government is ordering them to take down politically objectionable material or demanding private data about their users. Internet companies should resist collaborating in state oppression—in the interests of their own profits, as well as of Russian democracy.

One reason Western platforms should stand their ground is to keep faith with their own professed beliefs. The days when people thought the internet would naturally spread democratic values are over. But Silicon Valley’s liberalising mantras are not entirely hollow: rising internet use is making Russia’s information space more competitive. Alexei Navalny, an opposition leader banned from television, has millions of viewers on YouTube. Abroad, Mr Putin is known as a master manipulator of social media, but at home he is fighting to contain its political impact.

Another reason for Western platforms to resist being co-opted is that they can. Unlike China, whose rulers quickly recognised the internet’s threat and built a “Great Firewall”, Russia allowed it to grow intertwined with the outside world. A new law on “digital sovereignty” would let the Kremlin censor or cut off the national internet, but actually doing so would be technically and politically hard. Russian internet companies have servers abroad. Young Russians catch the YouTube habit when they are tots, because parents rely on it to entertain them. A big march is planned in Moscow on March 10th in defence of the internet.

Foreign internet companies do not have an entirely free hand. Western internet giants have servers in Russia. However, the Russian government would rather cajole the likes of Google than cut them off. This gives Western companies clout. They should use it.

The internet companies’ long-term self-interest matches their principles. Complying with morally dubious government demands threatens their reputation. When news emerged that Yahoo, a web portal, had been telling the Chinese government about its users, its reputation suffered. So far, Facebook and Google have resisted Russian requests to reveal users’ identities. Announcing a pivot to a more privacy-friendly stance this week (see article), Facebook’s boss, Mark Zuckerberg, said his firm would not store sensitive data “in countries with weak records on human rights”. Google has been fined for not removing banned websites from search results. But in the first half of 2018 Google acceded to 78% of the Russian government’s requests to remove material. The firms could do more to stand their ground.

Russia’s first internet connections were set up in 1989 at the Kurchatov nuclear institute, by scientists who wanted closer contact with the West. They called their network “Demos”. Today’s internet companies should make sure the internet remains a tool for building democracy, not dismantling it.

This article appeared in the Leaders section of the print edition under the headline "Don’t be evil"

U.S. users are leaving Facebook by the millions, Edison Research says

By Kimberly Adams

All the bad press about Facebook might be catching up to the company. New numbers from Edison Research show an an estimated 15 million fewer users in the United States compared to 2017. The biggest drop is in the very desirable 12- to 34-year-old group. Marketplace Tech got a first look at Edison's latest social media research. It revealed almost 80 percent of people in the U.S. are posting, tweeting or snapping, but fewer are going to Facebook. Marketplace’s Kimberly Adams talked with Larry Rosin, president of Edison Research. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Kimberly Adams: In your survey you found an estimated drop of 15 million fewer Facebook users in the U.S. today than in 2017. That's just in the U.S. Is this a meaningful drop for Facebook?

Larry Rosin: I don't see how you couldn't say it's a meaningful drop. Fifteen million is a lot of people, no matter which way you cut it. It represents about 6 percent of the total U.S. population ages 12 and older. What makes it particularly important is if it is part of a trend. This is the second straight year we've seen this number go down. Obviously, the U.S. is the biggest market, in terms of dollars, and it's going to be a super important market for Facebook or anybody who's playing in this game.

Courtesy of Edison Research and Triton Digital

Adams: But if we look at Facebook's earnings report, they are still reporting an increasing number of active users. What's behind the difference between what the company is saying and what your survey found?

Rosin: When they're producing those numbers, they're typically talking about their global platform. This is a survey just of the USA. Furthermore, we're asking about usage. We're saying, "Do you currently use Facebook?" Facebook is probably measuring it on, “Do you ever open the app, or do you ever use it on any level?”

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Check out the full Infinite Dial report

Adams: Are those people going somewhere else or leaving social media altogether?

Rosin: We only show trace numbers of people leaving social media altogether. They're obviously just transferring their usage. The big gainer, interestingly, is under the same roof as Facebook. It's their co-owned Instagram.

Courtesy of Edison Research and Triton Digital

Adams: Do you have any sense as to why people are leaving Facebook in particular?

Rosin: The survey didn't specifically ask, “Why are you using Facebook less?” or “Why have you stopped using Facebook?” among those who say that they have. There's tons of other information out there, whether it be the politically related aspects to Facebook. There's conjecture about as Facebook has become more popular among older people, whether that's affected younger people. Then we have to consider whether some of these other social media platforms, in particular Instagram and Snapchat, are just more appealing to younger people. I should also mention that while we've seen dramatic reductions in usage among younger people, we're still seeing some gains among people, for instance, 55 and older. That is maybe not the advertising target Facebook is necessarily looking to work on, but it's not as if all is lost there.

Related links: more details from Edison's Infinite Dial report

It’s pretty ironic that most of those Facebook departures seem to have gone to Instagram, which, being owned by Facebook, doesn't necessarily have better policies.

And it's worth noting that Facebook is still the most-used social media platform, according to Edison, with 61 percent of people in the U.S. using the site.

Instagram is a distant second.

Edison also looked at media hardware and found smartphone ownership continues to rise. About 84 percent of us in the U.S., 237 million people, own these pocket computers.

Smart speaker ownership saw a big jump in the last couple of years and keeps climbing. About 23 percent of us have them now, with Amazon's Alexa devices in the lead. One interesting trend developing around smart speakers is that people who get one tend to want multiple. In 2018, only about a tenth of smart speaker owners had several. Now, about a quarter of owners have three or more.