Facebook founder-CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that after three years of heavy investment, through the end of 2019, the social media giant may be able to breathe a sign of relief on privacy and security.
Sooner would be great. A mass anti-Semitic shooting of, mail bombs to Trump critics and general political vitriol ahead of the Nov. 6 midterm elections, all intertwined with social media in various ways, heighten the drama around the company’s quest to yank fake accounts, fake news and hate speech.
“A few years ago, Facebook was very behind where it needed to be,” Zuckerberg told analysts on a third-third-quarter earnings call. “We started a three-year roadmap through the end of 2019 to get our systems to the level where we think we should be at—systems that can flag information that we think might be problematic to a much larger security and review team.” But “we are up against sophisticated adversaries and threats will continue to evolve,” he predicted. “They are not problems that we fix, they are problems that we manage over time. There is no silver bullet, where you do the thing and you are done,” he said. “But we are getting better and better at this.”
He said Facebook’s flagged groups from Russia and Iran using social media to sway elections and exacerbate political and social divisions in the U.S., the U.K and elsewhere. Ditto with local groups doing the same in recent elections in Brazil. With midterms coming, “We will see all the good and bad that people can do.”
Facebook issues Transparency Reports that list government requests for user data and explain how and why it takes down content that is sexual or violent, terrorist propaganda, hate speech, spam and fake accounts. Zuckerberg and his fellow social media CEOS have been hauled before Congress to discuss security and privacy. A scandal exploded last spring around now-defunct political consultancy Cambridge Analytica’s access to the personal data of Facebook users.
That conundrum, of free, ad-driven social media platforms selling user information to advertisers, grabbed the attention of politicians and the public. As did the unprecedented reach and influence of the platforms. Both were driven home on Tuesday as Facebook reported revenue of $13.7 billion for the three months ended in September, up 33%. Of that, $13.5 billion was advertising.
It had 1.49 billion daily average users and 2.27 billion monthly average users in September. And it estimated that more than 2.6 billion people now use Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, or Messenger each month. That’s a lot of people to monitor.
Zuckerberg told analysts to expect hefty spending in 2019. “We have significantly improved our security, but we have a lot to do.”
