Facebook was “behind” in stopping foreign interference in the 2016 US elections, the social network’s founder has said.
Now Mark Zuckerberg has described an “arms race” to stop election interference by countries including Russia, China and Iran.
He told BBC News that Facebook was not prepared for the level of state-sponsored meddling in the 2016 contest between Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton, but has since learned lessons.
Facebook, owner of Instagram and WhatsApp, was engulfed by scandal after tens of millions of its users had their personal data harvested for use by political consultants such as Cambridge Analytica.
Now Mr Zuckerberg has claimed his company is in a better position to resist attempts to influence the outcome of elections.
He said: “Countries are going to continue to try and interfere and we are going to see issues like that but we have learnt a lot since 2016 and I feel pretty confident that we are going to be able to protect the integrity of the upcoming election.”
During the coronavirus pandemic, Facebook has also been criticised for allowing the proliferation of Covid-19 conspiracy theories.
Mr Zuckerberg told the BBC that Facebook will remove content that could result in “immediate harm”, and said it had removed content from groups involving conspiracies about the rollout of 5G.
He said: “Even if something isn't going to lead to imminent physical harm, we don't want misinformation to be the content that is going viral across the network so we work with independent fact checkers.
"Since the Covid outbreak, they have issued 7,500 notices of misinformation which has led to us issuing 50 million warning labels on posts.
“We know these are effective because 95 per cent of the time, users don't click through to the content with a warning label.”
