5/22/22, 6:36 PM Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook’s future, fake news, and Russian mischief - Vox Javier Zarracina/Vox; Jeff Chiu/AP Ezra Klein One of the scary stories I’ve read about Facebook over the past year is that it had become a real source of anti-Rohingya propaganda in Myanmar, and thus become part of an ethnic cleansing. Phil Robertson, who’s a deputy director of Human Rights Watch in Asia, made the point that Facebook is dominant for news information in Myanmar but Myanmar is not an incredibly important market for Facebook. It doesn’t get the attention we give things that go wrong in America. I doubt you have a proportionate amount of staff in Myanmar to what you have in America. And he said the result is you end up being like “an absentee landlord” in Southeast Asia. Is Facebook too big to manage its global scale in some of these other countries, the ones we don’t always talk about in this conversation, effectively? Mark Zuckerberg So one of the things I think we need to get better at as we grow is becoming a more global company. We have offices all over the world, so we’re already quite global. But our headquarters is here in California and the vast majority of our community is not even in the US, and it’s a constant challenge to make sure that we’re putting due attention on all of the people in different parts of the community around the world. The Myanmar issues have, I think, gotten a lot of focus inside the company. I remember, one Saturday morning, I got a phone call and we detected that people were trying to spread sensational messages through — it was Facebook Messenger in this case — to each side of the conflict, basically telling the Muslims, “Hey, there’s about to be an uprising of the Buddhists, so make sure that you are armed and go to this place.” And then the same thing on the other side. So that’s the kind of thing where I think it is clear that people were trying to use our tools in order to incite real harm. Now, in that case, our systems detect that that’s going on. We stop those messages from going through. But this is certainly something that we’re paying a lot of attention to. https://www.vox.com/2018/4/2/17185052/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-interview-fake-news-bots-cambridge 13/16