Zuckerberg calls on Europe to better regulate social networks

During meetings with European officials in Brussels, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg urged the EU to better regulate political advertisements on social media and take measures that would better guarantee that the privacy and data users is protected from authoritarian governments like Russia and China.
Setting up a common set of rules for regulating information and data privacy o social networks will reassure users that tech giants are being forced to work within an accepted framework.
“Users don’t want private companies making decisions about how to balance social equities without a democratic process,” Zuckerberg said while giving a speech at the Munich Security Conference in Germany. “I believe our responsibility is to build the sort of operational muscle that is needed to enforce policies, fight interference, and have good auditing controls.”
Zuckerberg added that governments should provide more guidelines on political advertising, or “what discourse should be allowed and drawing a line between harmful expression and freedom. Most notably, the 35-year-old American entrepreneur went on to admit that he probably would not agree with all the rules, but that a process needs to be built to improve the Internet’s regulation.
The European Union, in Zuckerberg’s view, must do far more to step up its efforts if it hopes to crack down on the spread of disinformation and prevent the world’s more authoritarian countries from making their values acceptable to the wider public through the internet.
“To encode democratic values, open values, we’ve got to move forward quickly before more authoritarian models are adopted in a lot of places,” Zuckerberg said.
Zuckerberg argued that it is impossible to control what is published on Facebook using the same standards as for newspapers because the sheer volume of material posted on the Internet means that the models are different. However, he agreed that companies operating on social networks cannot be passive when it comes to the transfer of damaging content.