Mark Zuckerberg is promising his “most comprehensive take” yet on the challenges and threats to free expression that Facebook faces around the world.
Zuckerberg’s speech is being delivered at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.
“I’ve tried to distill a lot of what I’ve learned over the past few years of focusing intensely on these issues,” he said in a Facebook post on Wednesday. “I spent a lot of time working on this, and it’s an unfiltered take on how I think about these questions.”
Earlier in the week, Zuckerberg defended meetings he’s reportedly had with conservative leaders after .DeleteFacebook began trending on social media.
Politico reported this week that the Facebook CEO held private meetings with, among others, Fox News’s Tucker Carlson and conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt.
Zuckerberg is scheduled to be interviewed by Fox News for an interview airing Friday afternoon.
Conservatives have long accused Facebook of suppressing conservative political view and the company has tried to dispel that belief.
Zuckerberg said he meets with many people “across the spectrum on lots of different issues.
“Meeting new people and hearing from a wide range of viewpoints is part of learning,” Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post. “If you haven’t tried it, I suggest you do!”
Criticism over Trump ads
Facebook has fought allegations since the lead-up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election that it’s not doing enough to stop bogus accounts and political ads on its platform.
As documented in special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the election, as well as testimony from Facebook officials, hundreds of accounts were created by the Internet Research Agency, located in Saint Petersburg and believed linked to the Kremlin. The tens of thousand of posts sought to roil the electorate and generally favoured Republicans, U.S. intelligence officials have found.
As well, Zuckerberg was forced to apologize for data privacy flaws after the tech company Cambridge Analytica was found to have harvested the information of millions of users, in service of political operators in both the U.S. ahead of the election and the United Kingdom as it prepared to vote on whether to stay in the European Union.
In terms of the upcoming U.S. election, Democratic candidates Joe Biden and Sen. Elizabeth Warren have demanded that Facebook remove Donald Trump campaign ads that make false claims.
After Facebook refused to remove the ad, saying that it’s not a political gatekeeper, Warren paid for a fake political ad that claimed Zuckerberg and Facebook have endorsed President Trump.
The ad states in the next sentence that it’s not true.
This month, leaked audio from an internal Facebook meeting in July revealed that Zuckerberg told staff they would “go to the mat” to defeat Warren’s expected effort to break up the company if she is elected president.
The Facebook founder has not just met with conservatives in D.C. NBC News reported he met Wednesday with Democratic Congress member Maxine Waters, as he will be appearing before the House’s financial services committee on Oct. 23 over the company’s plans to launch a digital currency.
Waters is the chair of the committee.
Outside of the U.S. political questions, Facebook has faced criticism for allowing autocrats to more easily spread propaganda, as well as over response times to take down posts and videos related to deadly acts of violence.