Mark Zuckerberg Promises Facebook Will Crack Down on 'Hate Speech' Ahead of Midterm Elections

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated recently that the upcoming U.S. midterm elections will be “a real test” of the company’s ability to crack down on “hate speech” and misinformation.

The Hollywood Reporter stated in a recent article that Facebook will make its biggest increase in money spent to combat “hate speech” and misinformation on its platform this year, according to CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg stated that despite Facebook’s increased expenditure, the company still won’t be as “dialed in as well as everyone would like us to be,” in relation to security and influence campaigns on the platform.

Zuckerberg stated that the upcoming midterm elections will be “a real test” of the newly implemented safeguards designed to protect the platform from “bad actors,” following reports of numerous foreign influence campaigns on the social media website. Zuckerberg said that during the upcoming election, the platform will see “all the good and bad that humanity can do,” but that the social media platform is getting better at hiding the “bad stuff” from users.

Zuckerberg stated that the social media firm will “never be perfect” at safeguarding users data — an issue that Facebook has had extensive problems with over the past year. The CEO stated that there is no “silver bullet” that would fix the issue of user data leaks.

Facebook’s most recent earnings report shows that company is facing issues with user growth over the last quarter in both the U.S. and Europe, the number of U.S. users has remained flat while the company has actually begun to lose users in Europe. Zuckerberg stated in an earnings call: “We may be close to saturated in developed countries.”

While the company’s daily active user count averaged out at around 1.49 billion in September, an increase 9% over last year’s results, the firm’s daily averages in the U.S. and Canada have remained flat at 185 million users since the first quarter of 2018. Daily active users in Europe declined from 279 million in the second quarter to 278 million in the third quarter. In the first quarter, Facebook boasted 282 million users in Europe.