5/22/22, 6:36 PM Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook’s future, fake news, and Russian mischief - Vox Javier Zarracina/Vox; Drew Angerer/Getty Images Ezra Klein One thing that has been damaging for Facebook over the past year is a concern will arise and initially the answer is, “Very, very few people saw fake news.” Or, “Very, very few people saw anything from Russia-related bots.” And then slowly it comes out, “No, actually it was more. Millions. Maybe hundreds of millions.” The problem wasn’t the lack of transparency; it was how to know we could trust what was coming out. And one of the reasons I’m interested to hear you broach the idea of independent institutions is I wonder if part of transparency has to be creating modes of information that are independent. Mark Zuckerberg Yeah, I think that’s a good point. And I certainly think what you’re saying is a fair criticism. It’s tough to be transparent when we don’t first have a full understanding of where the state of some of the systems [is]. In 2016, we were behind having an understanding and operational excellence on preventing things like misinformation, Russian interference. And you can bet that’s a huge focus for us going forward. Right now in the company, I think we have about 14,000 people working on security and community operations and review, just to make sure that we can really nail down some of those issues that we had in 2016. After the 2016 US elections, a number of months later, there were the French elections. And for that, we spent a bunch of time developing new AI tools to find the kind of fake accounts spreading misinformation and we took down — I think it was more than 30,000 accounts, and I think the reports out of France were that people felt like that was a much cleaner election on social media. A few months later, there were the German elections. And there, we augmented the playbook again to work directly with the election commission in Germany. If you work with the government in a country, they’ll really actually have a fuller understanding of what is going on and what are all the issues that we would need to focus on. https://www.vox.com/2018/4/2/17185052/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-interview-fake-news-bots-cambridge 5/16