Facebook CEO Matt Zuckerberg told an Aspen audience Wednesday that it will take government regulation to tighten election security for the social-media giant, saying “that type of work is a little above our pay grade.”
Zuckerberg was a late addition to the lineup of the Aspen Ideas Festival. Nonetheless, a sizable crowd gathered at the Benedict Music Tent to hear him discuss the litany of issues that have dogged the company over the past few years, chiefly Russia’s interference into the 2016 presidential election, privacy breaches and content moderation.
“As a private company, we don’t have the tools to make the Russian government stop,” he told interviewer Cass Sunstein, a professor at Harvard, adding that “we can defend as best as we can, but our government is the one that has the tools to apply pressure to Russia, not us.”
The Facebook co-founder, 39, added that countries — not social media companies — should be determining which types of election advertising are permitted and forbidden.
In the lead-up to the abortion ban referendum election last year in Ireland, for example, some pro-life groups from the U.S. wanted to run political advertisements on Facebook, he said. The Irish government told Facebook it did not have laws about foreign political advertising, so Facebook took it upon itself not to allow the ads.
“During (Ireland’s) election, leading up to that referendum, a bunch of pro-life American groups advertised … to try to influence public opinion there,” Zuckerberg said. “And we went to the Irish and asked folks there, ‘Well, how do you want us to handle this? You have no laws on the books that are relevant for whether we should be allowing this kind of speech in your election, and really this doesn’t feel like the kind of thing a private company should be making a decision on.’”
This story will be updated.