Mark Zuckerberg has called on governments and regulators to come up with new rules for the internet in four key areas of policy.
The Facebook founder and supremo said in a Washington Post op-ed over the weekend that he wants to see more intervention in: harmful content; election integrity; privacy; and data portability.
He agreed that the social network should not be the one making important decisions on issues such as what counts as terrorist propaganda, arguing for a more “standardized approach” in which third-party bodies set standards around the distribution of harmful content.
Regulators should then set baselines for what’s prohibited based on full transparency from internet companies on the scale of harmful content online.
Zuckerberg also called for legislation to protect elections, including common standards for verifying political actors and more attention paid to the use of data to target voters.
In a big win for EU legislators, he promoted the idea of GDPR-style laws in the US and elsewhere to promote transparency and accountability among organizations and enhance the rights of data subjects. This should include sanctions against firms like Facebook when the come up short, he added.
Regulation should also guarantee data portability, providing consumers with greater choice and stimulating more innovation in the market, he concluded. This is also a key feature of the GDPR, although Zuckerberg went further, calling for a common data transfer standard based on the open source Data Transfer Project.
The social network is very much in the firing line for US regulators, with an ongoing FTC investigation into its privacy practices following the Cambridge Analytica scandal anticipated to result in a fine of over $1bn.
The firm was also slammed earlier this year in a UK parliamentary report into fake news, accused of being a “digital gangster” and of misleading a committee of lawmakers.