Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Wednesday that he believes the U.S. intelligence community when it says Russia was using Facebook to interfere in U.S. elections.
[Also read: Trump says he misspoke, accepts US intelligence on Russian meddling]
Zuckerberg told Recode that he has “no reason” not to believe U.S. intelligence when it says Russia misused Facebook.
“These are real things. These aren’t things that someone made up. We saw this activity. We went out, we traced [Internet Research Agency] activity, not only through what they’ve tried to do in the U.S., but we’ve traced that activity back to trying to manipulate culture and news in Russia itself,” Zuckerberg said of the Saint Petersburg-based Russian company.
Zuckerberg also talked about how the tech giant is working to pursue the threats and prevent such disinformation campaigns from going through the social media platform in the future.
“In retrospect, I do think it’s fair to say that we were overly idealistic and focused on more of the good parts of what connecting people and giving people a voice can bring,” Zuckerberg said when asked what took him so long to realize the issues Facebook was experiencing.
“I think now we understand that, given where we are, both the centrality of Facebook, but also, frankly, we’re a profitable enough company to have 20,000 people go work on reviewing content, so I think that means that we have a responsibility to go do that.”
