Mark Zuckerberg has called for governments and regulators to take a more active role in regulating the internet and at the same time introduced his own “rules of the internet.”
In an op-ed for The Washington Post, the Facebook CEO said he wanted to preserve the freedom for “people to express themselves and for entrepreneurs to build new things”, while also protecting people from harmful content.
In the piece, Zuckerberg outlined four key areas that he would like to see government better regulate for websites including his own: harmful content, election integrity, privacy, and data portability.
“…if we were starting from scratch, we wouldn’t ask companies to make these judgments alone,” he said.
Despite Zuckerberg’s latest comments about better government intergration, in the past he has refused to work directly with government in pursuit of these goals.
Last year he twice rebuked a UK parliamentary request to testify as part of a committee on fake news.
An international committee including Australia, Argentina, Ireland and Canada was formed demanding that the CEO appear to clear up concerns of political interference on the platform.
The remarks come in a week when the social network told Business Insider that it had “mistakenly deleted” Zuckerberg’s own posts between 2007-8 on the social network “due to technical errors”, and would be unable to retrieve them.