Facebook will do a better job of preventing bad actors from abusing its platform to manipulate this year’s U.S. presidential election than it did four years ago, its public affairs chief Nick Clegg said on Monday.
Facing a critical audience at a technology conference in Munich, Clegg, a British former deputy prime minister hired by Facebook in 2018, said interference by Russian and other operatives in the 2016 vote had “shocked everybody”.
But the world’s largest social network had since taken effective action to reduce the spread of fake news, he said, while most extremist political content was now being detected before it comes to public notice.
“We are getting better and better at protecting elections from foreign interference,” Clegg told the DLD technology conference.
“Touch wood, we will be able to do a lot better in the U.S. presidential elections this year than we did four years ago.”
U.S. special prosecutor Robert Mueller’s report into suspected Russian meddling in the presidential election found that Russian agents had used Facebook to spread divisive messages, including false news reports, to help elect Donald Trump and harm his opponent Hillary Clinton.
Facebook was plunged into crisis nearly two years ago by revelations that British political consultancy Cambridge Analytica had used data harvested from millions of unsuspecting users to target U.S. election ads.
In the audience was former Cambridge Analytica staffer-turned-whistleblower Brittany Kaiser who, in a question to Clegg, accused Facebook of wrongly comparing the proper task of moderating content on its platform to censorship.
Clegg, keeping his cool, respectfully disagreed: “I don’t think we do. We need to strike the right balance.”
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