“Breaking up these companies wouldn’t make any of those problems better. … We have an ability now, because we are a successful company and are large, to go build these systems that are unprecedented … more sophisticated than a lot of governments have,” Zuckerberg said at the Aspen Ideas Festival.
Being smaller doesn’t make the issues any different, he said, pointing to services with far fewer users such as Reddit and Twitter. He says the answer is making sure there is more regulation and that companies all follow the same rules.
“It’s not the case that if you broke up Facebook into a bunch of pieces you suddenly wouldn’t have those issues. You would have those issues, you would just be much less equipped to deal with them.”
He also went on to say there's no evidence that the companies Facebook has bought — Instagram and WhatsApp, specifically — would have been more innovative on their own: "Some mergers can be bad for innovation. These weren’t."
Mark Zuckerberg said Wednesday that Facebook will continue to mark videos that are clearly false or manipulated and limit their distribution across the social network – such as a recent one of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that was edited to make her appear to be slurring her words. But Facebook will not take such videos down, he said.
“If it’s misinformation, we say, okay, we don’t think it should be against the rules to say something that happens to be false to your friends,” he said Wednesday afternoon during an interview on stage at the Aspen Ideas Festival.
Responding to a question from interviewer Cass Sunstein, Zuckerberg said he doesn’t think people want such content to be censored.
“If you’re just hiding things that are rumors, how are people going to refute them?” he asked. “I think it would be overreach to say, ‘Hey, you can’t say something that’s not correct to your friends.'”
He added that Facebook is “thinking through” what kind of policy it should have regarding deepfakes, which are videos created using artificial intelligence that appear to show someone doing or saying something they did not. Politicians and government officials have warned about their use ahead of upcoming elections.
The company is talking to “a lot of different experts” about deepfakes, he said, and as AI technology improves he thinks it’s “sensible” to have a specific policy that treats such content differently from how the company typically treats false information online.
Facebook wants some help making hard calls. CEO Mark Zuckerberg rehashed his position on government regulation at the Aspen Ideas Festival on Wednesday. As the company has grown in size and spread around the world, it has had to make complicated decisions about balancing free speech and human dignity, or what rules to enforce around election advertising, Zuckerberg said.
"I really don’t think that as a society we want private companies to be the final word on making these decisions," said Zuckerberg.
On Wednesday afternoon, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is sitting down for a “conversation” on stage at the Aspen Ideas Festival to discuss “government regulation, shifts to privacy, and innovation.”