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U.S. congressional and state elections set for November 2018
present a deadline of sorts for Facebook and other social media
companies to get better at halting the kind of election meddling
that the United States accuses Russia of.
"We are working on all of this stuff actively now, so there is a
big focus in the company to improve all of this on a regular
basis," Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer said in an interview.
"You're going to see a regular cadence of updates and changes,"
he said, speaking on the sidelines of a conference that Facebook
is hosting about virtual reality technology.
Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said last month that the company
would begin treating political ads differently from other ads,
including by making it possible for anyone to see political ads,
no matter whom they target. U.S. lawmakers had begun calling for
regulations.
Disclosures by Facebook, Twitter Inc and Alphabet Inc's Google
that their products were battlegrounds for Russian election
meddling last year have turned into a crisis for Silicon Valley.
Facebook's chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, is in
Washington this week meeting U.S. lawmakers.
Moscow has denied allegations of meddling in last year's U.S.
presidential election.
Implementing changes is tricky, Schroepfer said, because
Facebook does not want to stifle legitimate speech and because
of the volume of material on Facebook, the world's largest
social network with 2 billion users and 5 million advertisers.
"We're investing very heavily in technical solutions, because
we're operating at an unprecedented scale," he said.
Facebook is also using humans. The company said this month it
would hire 1,000 more people to review ads and ensure they meet
its terms.
Schroepfer, 42, has been Facebook's CTO since 2013 and
previously was director of engineering. He also sits on
Facebook's board of directors.
Facebook has dealt with problematic user-generated content in
the past, he said.
"We don't want misuse of the platform, whether that's a foreign
government trying to intercede in a democracy - that's obviously
not OK - or whether it's an individual spewing hate or uploading
pornography," he said.
(Reporting by David Ingram; Editing by Kim Coghill)
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