Journalist Tanit Koch and Facebook’s VP of Communications, Nick Clegg, discuss Facebook’s measures to protect the U.S. 2020 election and monitor the spread of misinformation. “It is now possible for campaigns, in real time, to see who is paying for ads”, observed Nick Clegg in this conversation, recorded in January 2020.
Facebook, Clegg said, had hired thousands of workers to protect elections from local as well as foreign interference. But he admitted that the platform had become a target of individuals and organizations spreading misinformation. “When you have one third of the world’s population communicating over your apps and devices, being human nature, you have the good and the bad”, Clegg said.
Confronted with Tanit Koch’s criticism that Facebook “makes it extremely complicated for the people who are on the victim side of hate speech or who are slandered”, Clegg stated the need to “strike the right balance between different and often conflicting values of free expression and privacy.” He added, “how that balance is struck shouldn’t be left to the discussion of private companies.”
