COMING CLEAN

Mark Zuckerberg Says Internet Needs ‘New Rules’ in Washington Post Op-Ed

Zuckerberg calls on lawmakers to regulate “harmful content, election integrity, privacy and data portability.”

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has called on lawmakers to create new regulations for the internet in a Washington Post op-ed published Saturday. “I believe we need a more active role for governments and regulators,” Zuckerberg writes. “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.” Zuckerberg says he believes these updates can be broken down into four categories “harmful content, election integrity, privacy and data portability.”

The CEO has come under fire for Facebook’s approach to handling issues in all four of these categories. Most recently, he testified before Congress on the use of Facebook by Russian hackers during the 2016 election, addressed anti-vaccination propaganda on the site, and has been criticized for allowing advertisers to target users interested in “white genocide conspiracy theory.” “Lawmakers often tell me we have too much power over speech, and frankly I agree,” Zuckerberg wrote. “I’ve come to believe that we shouldn’t make so many important decisions about speech on our own.”

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