5/22/22, 6:36 PM Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook’s future, fake news, and Russian mischief - Vox And then fast-forward to last year, 2017, and the special election in Alabama. We deployed a number of new tools that we’d developed to find fake accounts who were trying to spread false news, and we got them off before a lot of the discussion around the election. And again, I think we felt a lot better about the result there. Javier Zarracina/Vox; AFP/Getty Images Ezra Klein Let me ask you about your tools to punish that misbehavior, though. The risk reward of manipulating a national election using Facebook is very high. If you’re Russia and you get caught hacking into our election systems — which they also tried to do — and you fail and Hillary Clinton wins, the consequences of that can be really severe. Sanctions could be tremendous, and you could even imagine something like that escalating into armed conflict. If you do this on Facebook, maybe you get caught and your bots get shut down, but Facebook, in not being a government, really doesn’t have the ability to punish. If Cambridge Analytica messes with everybody’s privacy, you can’t throw them in jail in the way that, if you’re a doctor and you repeatedly violate HIPAA, the government makes sure you face very severe legal consequences. So do you have capacity to do not just detection but sanction? Is there a way to increase the cost of using your platform for these kinds of efforts? Mark Zuckerberg I can walk through how we’re basically approaching this. There are three big categories of fake news. There’s a group of people who are like spammers. These are the people who, in pre-social media days, would’ve been sending you Viagra emails. The basic playbook that you want to run on that is just make it non-economical. So the first step, once we realized that this was an issue, was a number of them ran Facebook ads on their webpages. We immediately said, “Okay. Anyone who’s even remotely sketchy, no way are you going to be able to use our tools to monetize.” So the amount of money that they made went down. Then they’re trying to pump this content into Facebook with the hopes that people will click on it and see ads and make money. As our systems get better at detecting this, we show the https://www.vox.com/2018/4/2/17185052/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-interview-fake-news-bots-cambridge 6/16