In the two years since Facebook’s social media platform was leveraged by Russian intelligence agencies seeking to sway the 2016 presidential election, founder Mark Zuckerberg says he has systematically devoted staff and technology to blocking further exploitation.
“We’ve fundamentally altered our DNA to focus more on preventing harm in all our services,” he said in a letter to Facebook’s 2 billion monthly users that recapped the Menlo Park, Calif.-based company’s response to U.S. lawmakers’ concerns about handling of consumer data, hate speech and election interference.
But focusing 30,000 workers on safety and investing billions of dollars a year in security, “doesn’t mean we’ll catch every bad actor or piece of bad content, or that people won’t find more examples of past mistakes before we improved our systems,” Zuckerberg added. “For some of these issues, like election interference or harmful speech, the problems can never fully be solved — they’re challenges against sophisticated adversaries and human nature.”
Zuckerberg’s description of Facebook’s efforts comes amid growing scrutiny of the company and its rivals as special counsel Robert Mueller investigates the conduct of President Trump’s 2016 campaign and Republican lawmakers claim that Silicon Valley social media firms are downplaying conservative voices on their platforms.
Momentum for a federal privacy bill is increasing, too, after the disclosure that hackers compromised as many as 30 million Facebook accounts in September and the discovery earlier in the year that a consultant on Trump’s 2016 campaign improperly gained access to information on 87 million users.
Earlier this month, Facebook alerted users to a bug that may have given outside apps unintended access to the photos of 6.8 million users, part of its now-heightened commitment to transparency with users. At the same time, the platform has improved systems for identifying fake accounts and coordinated misinformation campaigns, devoting a “war room” to the work during this year’s mid-term elections.
The company has also developed algorithms to identify and remove hate speech and terrorist content and reduced the amount of user information that app developers can access.
“Overall, we’ve built some of the most advanced systems in the world for identifying and resolving these issues, and we will keep improving over the coming years,” Zuckerberg wrote. “I’m proud of the progress we’ve made.”
