Zuckerberg ‘Dead Serious’ About Fixing Facebook Security at Expense of Profit

Facebook in Q3 experienced its first quarter with more than $10 billion in revenue, said CEO Mark Zuckerberg on a Wednesday earnings call. “None of that matters if our services are used in a way that doesn't bring people closer together, or if the foundation of our society is undermined by foreign interference,” he said. “I've expressed how upset I am that the Russians tried to use our tools to sow mistrust. We built these tools to help people connect and to bring us closer together, and they used them to try to undermine our values. What they did is wrong, and we are not going to stand for it.” Facebook “is doing everything we can to help the U.S. government get a complete picture of what happened,” said Zuckerberg. Efforts “sweeping across all our platforms” are aimed at identifying and eradicating fake accounts, it told the Senate Judiciary Committee Tuesday (see 1710310061). Facebook is working with Congress “on legislation to make advertising more transparent,” said Zuckerberg. The company is “moving forward on our own to bring advertising on Facebook to an even higher standard of transparency than ads on TV or other media,” he said. It soon will “start rolling out a tool that lets you see all of the ads a page is running and also an archive" of political ads that "have run in the past,” he said. The platform has 10,000 employees “working on safety and security, and we're planning to double that to 20,000 in the next year to better enforce our community standards and review ads,” he said. “In many places, we're doubling or more our engineering efforts focused on security.” It’s also building new artificial intelligence “to detect bad content and bad actors, just like we've done with terrorist propaganda,” he said. “I am dead serious about this. And the reason I'm talking about this on our earnings call is that I've directed our teams to invest so much in security on top of the other investments we're making that it will significantly impact our profitability going forward, and I wanted our investors to hear that directly from me. I believe this will make our society stronger, and in doing so will be good for all of us over the long term. But I want to be clear about what our priority is. Protecting our community is more important than maximizing our profits.” Facebook shares closed 2.1 percent lower Thursday at $178.92.