Facebook isn’t the same company today that it was during the 2016 presidential campaign, when its platform was used by foreign agents to manipulate American voters, but its chief operating officer says it still has work to do.
The Menlo Park, Calif.-based social media giant now has 30,000 employees devoted to platform security, three times more than in 2017, Sheryl Sandberg said at a Digital Life Design conference in Munich, Germany. It’s also investing in new technology that can flag inauthentic posts like those used by the Kremlin-linked Internet Research Agency to inflame voters before Donald Trump’s unexpected defeat of Democratic rival Hillary Clinton.
“We have a fundamentally different approach to how we run our company today,” Sandberg said. “If you want to know what a company cares about, you look at where it’s spending its money. People want to know we care about them more than we care about our bottom line.”
The company, founded by CEO Mark Zuckerberg before he dropped out of Harvard, has had a rocky three years. In addition to the scrutiny after U.S. intelligence agencies said that Russian agents sought to sway the 2016 election in Trump’s favor, in part through misleading social media posts and phony news articles, Facebook was criticized for failing to protect information on some 87 million users improperly accessed by a consultant on Trump’s campaign.
Prior to the 2018 midterm elections, Facebook made a variety of moves to prevent further manipulation of its 2 billion users a month, setting up a war room at its headquarters and revealing more information about the identities of users posting political ads. It has also taken down millions of pieces of inauthentic content, uncovering election-interference attempts from both Russia and Iran.
“There have always been people who want to undermine democracy, and as they always have, they’re going to use every front they can for these attacks,” Sandberg said.
Fighting such efforts helped drive Facebook’s expenses up to 58 percent of the company’s $13.7 billion in revenue in the three months through September alone.
“These last few years have been really difficult,” Sandberg said Monday. “We know we need to do better at making sure we can anticipate the risks from connecting so many people, we need to stop abuse more quickly and we need to do more to protect people’s data.”
Indeed, Facebook has said it supports privacy legislation in the U.S. giving people more control over personal information used by companies, including the rights to delete and transfer it.
One such proposal, the Social Media Privacy and Consumer Rights Act from Sens. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., and John Kennedy, R-La., would give consumers the right to disable data-tracking and collection, require terms of service to be written in plain language, and mandate that users be informed of data breaches within three days.
“Every day, companies profit off of the data they’re collecting from Americans, yet leave consumers completely in the dark about how their personal information, online behavior and private messages are being used,” Klobuchar said in a statement.
