{"id":118071,"date":"2018-09-10T12:00:37","date_gmt":"2018-09-10T11:00:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=118071"},"modified":"2018-09-07T12:36:19","modified_gmt":"2018-09-07T11:36:19","slug":"mark-zuckerberg-protecting-democracy-is-an-arms-race-heres-how-facebook-can-help","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2018\/09\/mark-zuckerberg-protecting-democracy-is-an-arms-race-heres-how-facebook-can-help\/","title":{"rendered":"Mark Zuckerberg: Protecting Democracy Is an Arms Race – Here\u2019s How Facebook Can Help"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies before a House committee in April. (Andrew Harnik\/AP)<\/p><\/div>\n

4 Sep 2018 – <\/em>When you build services that connect billions of people across countries and cultures, you\u2019re going to see all of the good that humanity can do, and you\u2019re also going to see people try to abuse those services in every way possible. Our responsibility at Facebook is to amplify the good and mitigate the bad.<\/p>\n

This is especially true when it comes to elections. Free and fair elections are the heart of every democracy. During the 2016 election, we were actively looking for traditional cyberattacks, and we found them. What we didn\u2019t find until later were foreign actors running coordinated campaigns to interfere with America\u2019s democratic process. Since then, we\u2019ve focused on improving our defenses<\/a> and making it much harder for anyone to interfere in elections.<\/p>\n

Key to our efforts has been finding and removing fake accounts<\/a> \u2014 the source of much of the abuse, including misinformation. Bad actors can use computers to generate these in bulk. But with advances in artificial intelligence, we now block millions of fake accounts<\/a> every day as they are being created so they can\u2019t be used to spread spam, false news or inauthentic ads.<\/p>\n

Increased transparency in our advertising systems is another area where we have also made progress. You can now see all the ads an advertiser is running \u2014 even if they aren\u2019t targeted to you. Anyone who wants to run political or issue ads in the United States on Facebook must verify their identity. All political and issue ads<\/a> must also make clear who paid for them, in the same way as TV or newspaper advertisements. But we\u2019ve gone even further by putting all these ads in a public archive<\/a>, which anyone can search to see how much was spent on each individual ad and the audience it reached. This greater transparency will increase responsibility and accountability for advertisers.<\/p>\n

As we\u2019ve seen from previous elections, misinformation is a real challenge. A big part of the solution is getting rid of fake accounts. But it\u2019s also about attacking the spammers\u2019 economic incentives to create false news in the first place. And where posts are flagged as potentially false, we pass them to independent fact-checkers<\/a> \u2014 such as the Associated Press and the Weekly Standard<\/a> \u2014 to review, and we demote posts rated as false, which means they lose 80\u00a0percent of future traffic.<\/p>\n

Facebook\u2019s Sheryl Sandberg and Twitter\u2019s Jack Dorsey testify before Congress<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

We\u2019re not working alone. After 2016, it became clear that everyone \u2014 governments, tech companies and independent experts \u2014 needs to do a better job of sharing the signals and information they have to prevent this kind of abuse. These bad actors don\u2019t restrict themselves to one service, and we shouldn\u2019t approach the problem in silos, either. That\u2019s why we\u2019re working more closely<\/a> with other technology companies on the cybersecurity threats we all face, and we\u2019ve worked with law enforcement to take down accounts in Russia.<\/p>\n

One of the biggest changes we\u2019ve made over the past year is not to wait for reports of suspicious activity. Instead, we look proactively for potentially harmful election-related content, such as pages registered to a foreign entity that post divisive content to sow mistrust and drive people apart. When we find them, our security team manually reviews the accounts to see whether they violate our policies. If they do, we quickly remove them. For example, we recently took down a network of accounts in Brazil<\/a> that was hiding its identity and spreading misinformation ahead of the country\u2019s presidential elections in October.<\/p>\n

For the U.S. midterm elections, we\u2019re also using a new tool<\/a> we tested in the Alabama Senate special election last year to identify political interference more quickly. This enabled us to find and remove foreign political spammers who\u2019d previously flown under the radar. And last month, we took down<\/a> hundreds of pages, groups and accounts for creating networks that were deliberately misleading people about their identities and intentions. Some originated in Iran and others in Russia.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m often asked how confident I feel about the midterms. We\u2019ve made a lot of progress, as our work during the French<\/a>, German<\/a>, Mexican<\/a> and Italian<\/a> elections has shown. In each case, we identified and removed fake accounts and bad content leading up to the elections and, in Germany, we worked directly<\/a> with the government to share information about potential threats. The investments we continue to make in people and technology will help us improve even further. But companies such as Facebook face sophisticated, well-funded adversaries who are getting smarter over time, too. It\u2019s an arms race, and it will take the combined forces of the U.S. private and public sectors to protect America\u2019s democracy from outside interference.<\/p>\n

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Mark Zuckerberg is chief executive officer of Facebook. <\/em><\/p>\n

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