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tv   The Mark Zuckerberg Interview  BBC News  May 23, 2020 8:30pm-8:46pm BST

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efiggflz‘uzr more cloud generally across england and wales but the reason cloud should stop temperatures falling below 10 degrees for most of us. we start cloud should stop temperatures falling below 10 degrees for most of us. falling below 10 degrees for most of us. we start cloudy —— sunday off in a damp cloudy note, rain peters out, a damp cloudy note, rain peters out, a bit of sunshine appearing across eastern scotland and north—east england, northern ireland and england, northern ireland and england and wales because the winds will be lighter and more sunshine, and warmer too. it stays dry, sunny and warmer too. it stays dry, sunny and warmer too. it stays dry, sunny and warm for many of us for the bank holiday monday, very warm in the south—east.
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hello this is bbc news with martine croxall. the headlines. a senior aide to the uk prime minister faces calls to resign after he travelled hundreds of miles with his wife —
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who had virus symptoms — during the lockdown. the government defended him — saying he wanted to stay with family to ensure he had childcare if he got symptoms of coronavirus. businesses will be expected to pay a quarter of the wages of furloughed workers — from the start of august. and guernsey becomes the first part of the british isles to remove nearly all its lockdown restrictions nearly all its lockdown restrictions. the pakistan govenrnment launches an official inquiry to investigate the plane crash that killed at least 97 people — but the pakistan pilots‘ association says it has "no faith" in the official investigation. spain's prime minister, pedro sanchez, says overseas visitors can visit the country from july and top flight spanish football will resume behind closed doors next month. now on bbc news in his first uk broadcast interview in five years, facebook founder mark zuckerberg talks to the bbc‘s business editor simon jack about fake news, fact checking, and the upcoming us presidential election.
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are there some permanent changes that you perceive from this and what do you think that your company's role has been during this crisis? sure, so... right now, we are mostly focused on helping people get through this period before worrying about what the longer changes are but we focused on three main areas. one is responding to the acute health crisis. the second is helping people stay connected with the people they care about, especially now since a lot of us are at home and can't go out and see our families and the people we love. so you are seeing internet use and communication app use go up a lot and there's a lot that we need to do there. and then the third area is on economic recovery. so, right now, we're seeing a lot of pain for small businesses having a hard time staying open as a lot
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of people are staying home. that means millions of people are losing jobs and i think anything we can do to help small businesses survive, stay afloat during this period and one of the biggest things that we are seeing there is a lot of small businesses are moving online, right? so, small businesses that didn't previously have an online presence or it wasn't a big part of what they did like a restaurant are now increasingly becoming like e—commerce businesses where they put their inventory online, people can order it and get delivery quickly. and then of course, a lot of other businesses that had online presences before, that's not quickly become online presences before, that's now quickly become their main store front. 0n the immediate health risks if some crazy person decided to start telling people to, i don't know, drink or inject bleach, or you know, saying colloidal silver would be a good way of keeping the virus at bay, what is the facebook algorithm's response to that?
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well, it's not our algorithm. we have policies around this, around stopping this information. we break this into two categories. so, there is harmful misinformation that puts people in imminent risk of physical harm. so, things like saying that something is a proven cure for the virus when in fact it isn't. we will take that down. and there have been hundreds of thousands of cases of things that are harmful misinformation. another example which i know has been very prevalent in the uk has been 56 misinformation which has led to some physical damage of 56 infrastructure. so, we believe that that is leading to imminent risk of physical harm and we take down that content. there have been hundreds of thousands of pieces of content like that. and we do take it down...
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we enforce that no matter who is saying it. so there was a case where the brazilian president went out and said that it was proven by all scientists, or something to that effect, that there is a drug that is proven to cure coronavirus and that's obviously not true. there is nothing yet at least that i'm aware of that's proven to be a cure. so, we had to enforce that. even if something isn't going to cause imminent risk of physical harm, we don't want misinformation to be the content that is broadly going viral across the network. so, we work with independent fact checkers. over the course of this period since the covid outbreak, they've issued about 7500 kind of articles saying fact checking content which has led to us showing about 50 million warning labels on different posts across oui’ services. and we know that those posts are effective because 95% of the time when someone sees a post
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that has a warning label on, they don't click through to see it. so, if you are saying something that is going to put people at imminent risk of harm, we take that down. if you are saying something that is just wrong but is spreading quickly but isn't going to put people at imminent risk, we don't take that down but we stop it from spreading generally. no one doubts the awesome responsibility that a company like facebook, which has whatsapp and instagram of course, the responsibility it has in the world. i mean, your old friend chris hughes who founded the company with you wrote a little note saying that facebook should be pertinent, these are his words. "mark alone because of the voting structure can decide how to configure the algorithm to discern what people see in their news feeds, what privacy settings they can use, and even which messages get delivered. he sets the rules for how to distinguish violent and incendiary speech." i mean, that is... do you — hand—on—heart as the controlling shareholder in facebook, do you hand—on—heart think it is a good idea
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for that responsibility to be invested in one human being, you? well, i've actually said probably that i don't think that any one individual or any company should be making so many decisions about important values for society like free expression and safety. i have said publicly and we've taken a lot of actions on that front. just recently we've established this independent oversight board which basically what it is, it's starting off, it's a group of about 20 experts who all... folks like formerjudges, former prime minister of denmark, academics, journalists, leaders of nonprofits, people who come from countries around the world and have a diversity of experiences but all have a commitment and understanding of free expression and human rights. and this oversight board will make it so that people in our community can appeal if they think we are making a decision
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incorrectly on content. and this board will have the final binding say. so if they say that something needs to come down or needs to stay up, at that point it doesn't even matter what i think or what the other folks on our team think. this independent board will get to make that decision. so, i do think that there needs to be some additional governance beyond just our company making all of the decisions which is why we are taking steps like that. i think that's very important. i know you are worth around $80 billion. ijust wonder why it's so important to you personally to stay in charge with this iron grip on a company at this stage of its development when it has this incredible role and responsibility in the way that, you know, moderating humanity. well, i think that being the founder of a company... i've been able to help build something that first of all a lot of people around the world really like using...
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they wouldn't like it any less if you sold some shares or change the voting structure, they'd still like it. sure. and to be clear, i have sold a lot of shares and i'm giving... i've committed to giving 99% of my wealth away over the course of my lifetime through the chan zuckerberg initiative, the family philanthropy that i've set up and already given a lot of money away through that. so, that's under way. i mean, look, there are things that we are able to do because i control the company and can take a longer—term outlook than other kind of shorter—term shareholder driven companies wouldn't be able to do. i think that if i didn't control the company, we would've sold the company earlier on in its history to yahoo. and who knows what would've happened then? when mobile was emerging, we started off as a website but now mobile is by far the biggest way people use the service and around the time of our ipo,
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there was a huge pressure. we hadn't built the business around mobile yet and everyone was saying, "you have to focus on building the business." and i said, "no, we need to make sure we get the experience right. that's going to take a couple of years which means our business isn't going to do well for a couple of years but i think that's the right thing over the long term." and that definitely ended up being true. and i think it would have been very hard for a lot of other companies to make decisions like that. we've got a us election coming up. at the time of the last election, you'll remember of course there was the cambridge analytica scandal where tens of millions of facebook users‘ data ended up in the hands of political lobbyists, etc. what are you doing to make sure that is not the case? because looking at — there was a princeton university survey saying that facebook was the fastest and biggest purveyor of misinformation in the us. do you think that facebook can influence the way people vote? well, there were a lot of questions and issues that you raised in what you just said. i think that the reality
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here is we've learned a lot since about how politics work online since 2016 and there are a lot of different threats that we've worked hard to mitigate. so, for example, one big area that we were behind on in 2016 — but i think now are quite advanced at — is identifying and fighting these coordinated information campaigns that come from different state actors around the world whether it's russia, or iran, or in some cases china. in 2016, this was a new kind of tactic. but now since then, we've worked with governments and the intelligence community and other tech companies to identify — i think it's about 50 different campaigns like this around the world where different states were trying to interfere — and take those down before they were able to cause a lot of harm. we've taken down billions of fake accounts across the system, and we have also taken a lot of measures to limit
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the spread of misinformation across oui’ systems. so, for where we are today, now we have had the benefit since 2016 — we've played a role in helping to protect the integrity of dozens of elections around the world since then. all with better and cleaner results then i think what we saw in 2016. all with better and cleaner results than i think what we saw in 2016. so, it's not that there aren't going to be continuing issues. countries are going to continue trying to interfere. so we will see issues like that. but it's a little bit of an arms race in that way. but i certainly think our systems are a lot more advanced now, i think in many ways more advanced than any other company or a lot of governments around the world. and i feel pretty confident about our ability to help protect the integrity of the upcoming elections. now on bbc news — the film review.
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hello and welcome to the film review with me, mark kermode, rounding up the best movies now available for viewing in the home. now cinemas may be closed, but movies can still transport us around the world. take the county, an arresting icelandic drama set in a remote farming community. recently widowed inga declares war on the local cooperative, which she believes has become
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a mafia—like monopoly, controlling the industry, driving up prices and exploiting the very community it was set up to protect. faced with the threat of bankruptcy and ever more suspicious of the forces which may have driven her husband to an early grave, inga finds her own voice, encouraging herfellow farmers to take back control of their lives through facebook blogs and milk spray protests, throwing shovel loads of manure at authority, both metaphorically and literally. in his 2015 film rams, writer—director grimur hakonarson explored the feud between two sheep—farming brothers who find themselves facing a cull that threatens both their ancestral stock and their entire way of life. here he peels back another layer of icelandic culture, focusing on a woman making her mark in a very male—dominated world.

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