People should decide what is credible, not tech companies: Zuckerberg

Just days after Twitter announced that it will be curbing how users can react to world leaders who break the rules on posting policies, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, in contrast, said it is the job of the people to decide what is credible and not tech companies.

“As a principle, in a democracy, I believe people should decide what is credible, not tech companies,” said Zuckerberg in a speech at the Georgetown University in Washington on Monday where he indirectly spoke against the many comments that Facebook has been facing on not bringing in more reforms against fake news and not policing news, especially of a political nature.

American politician Elizabeth Warren had blasted Facebook on October 12 for allowing to run political ads that contained fake news. 

Zuckerberg also referred to Dr Martin Luther King Jr’s speech, The Vietnam War and the First Amendment, where free speech brought about much-needed change. Zuckerberg also compared Facebook to the restrictions in China where authorities control the internet and freedom of speech. Facebook had tried many times to somehow get into the Chinese market but has been unsuccessful.

Back in India Facebook had also partnered with Reliance a few years ago to bring internet to the masses but the campaign came under immense flak as many felt it went against free internet and net neutrality.

Meanwhile, responding to widespread voices asking Twitter to ban American President Donald Trump, Zuckerberg said in an interview with CNN that Twitter should not ban Trump.

Zuckerberg says he does not agree with calls for Trump's social media to be shut down because, in a democracy, it was not the job of private companies to censor statements made by political parties or world leaders.

“I generally believe that as a principle, people should decide what is credible and what they want to believe, who they want to vote for,” he said during the CNN interview.

Zuckerberg’s free speech policies do not seem to go too well with the Indian government. TechCircle earlier reported on how 33.33% of global content removal requests for Facebook stemmed from India and 91.23% of the Indian government’s content removal requests across platforms were found to be made to Facebook.