Mark Zuckerberg said ahead of US midterms that Facebook can’t fight election interference alone

Facebook CEO Mark
Zuckerberg.
Photo by Chip
Somodevilla/Getty Images

• Mark Zuckerberg published a long Facebook post on
  Thursday entitled “Preparing for Elections”, two months before
  the US midterm elections.
• Zuckerberg outlined the challenges Facebook faces in
  trying to combat election interference, and highlighted the
  areas it is targeting to prevent it.
• He wrote that Facebook will not be able to fight bad
  actors alone, it will always need help from third parties such
  as governments, other tech companies, and journalists.

Mark Zuckerberg published an essay comprising more than 3,000
words on Thursday entitled
“Preparing for Elections”, two months before the US midterms
in November.

The essay is in essence a roundup of what Zuckerberg called “an
intense year” for Facebook, following a series of high profile
scandals, including
Cambridge Analytica and the discovery of
Russian misinformation campaigns operating on the platform.

Nowhere does Zuckerberg apologise in the post, and it’s more of a
blow-by-blow recounting of the steps Facebook has taken to tackle
these complex challenges.

“In 2016, we were not prepared for the coordinated information
operations we now regularly face. But we have learned a lot since
then and have developed sophisticated systems that combine
technology and people to prevent election interference on our
services,” he wrote.

Zuckerberg acknowledged the role of journalists, governments, and
non-profits in helping the platform fight misinformation.

“Preventing election interference is bigger than any single
organization. It’s now clear that everyone — governments, tech
companies, and independent experts such as the Atlantic Council —
need to do a better job sharing the signals and information they
have to prevent abuse.”

He said this is because bad actors rarely restrict their
activities to a single platform, and governments have access to
privileged information such as money flow, which can Facebook can
only learn about through collaboration.

“While I’d always rather Facebook identified abuse first, that
won’t always be possible. Sometimes we’ll only find activity with
tips from governments, other tech companies, or journalists.”

He said Facebook has started proactively cooperating with state
officials to solve the problem of election interference, writing,
“We’ve worked more closely with governments — including in
Germany, the US and Mexico — to improve security during
elections.”

Zuckerberg has already said much of what is in his essay during
various interviews and congressional appearances in the last six
months. But the post crystallizes
how his thinking has evolved. Not long after Donald Trump
became US president,
Zuckerberg was in denial about how fake news may have impacted
the election. A year later, he admitted that he should have
taken the problem more seriously.

You can read Zuckerberg’s full essay
here.