Mark Zuckerberg Stands for Voice and Free Expression
Today, Mark Zuckerberg spoke at Georgetown University about the importance of protecting free expression. He underscored his belief that giving everyone a voice empowers the powerless and pushes society to be better over time — a belief that’s at the core of Facebook.
In front of hundreds of students at the school’s Gaston Hall, Mark warned that we’re increasingly seeing laws and regulations around the world that undermine free expression and human rights. He argued that in order to make sure people can continue to have a voice, we should: 1) write policy that helps the values of voice and expression triumph around the world, 2) fend off the urge to define speech we don’t like as dangerous, and 3) build new institutions so companies like Facebook aren’t making so many important decisions about speech on our own.
Read Mark’s full speech below.
Standing For Voice and Free Expression
Hey everyone. It’s great to be here at Georgetown with all of you today.
Before we get started, I want to acknowledge that today we lost an icon, Elijah Cummings. He was a powerful voice for equality, social progress and bringing people together.
When I was in college, our country had just gone to war in Iraq. The mood on campus was disbelief. It felt like we were acting without hearing a lot of important perspectives. The toll on soldiers, families and our national psyche was severe, and most of us felt powerless to stop it. I remember feeling that if more people had a voice to share their experiences, maybe things would have gone differently. Those early years shaped my belief that giving everyone a voice empowers the powerless and pushes society to be better over time.
Back then, I was building an early version of Facebook for my community, and I got to see my beliefs play out at smaller scale. When students got to express who they were and what mattered to them, they organized more social events, started more businesses, and even challenged some established ways of doing things on campus. It taught me that while the world’s attention focuses on major events and institutions, the bigger story is that most progress in our lives comes from regular people having more of a voice.
Since then, I’ve focused on building services to do two things: give people voice, and bring people together. These two simple ideas — voice and inclusion — go hand in hand. We’ve seen this throughout history, even if it doesn’t feel that way today. More people being able to share their perspectives has always been necessary to build a more inclusive society. And our mutual commitment to each other — that we hold each others’ right to express our views and be heard above our own desire to always get the outcomes we want — is how we make progress together.
But this view is increasingly being challenged. Some people believe giving more people a voice is driving division rather than bringing us together. More people across the spectrum believe that achieving the political outcomes they think matter is more important than every person having a voice. I think that’s dangerous. Today I want to talk about why, and some important choices we face around free expression.
Throughout history, we’ve seen how being able to use your voice helps people come together. We’ve seen this in the civil rights movement. Frederick Douglass once called free expression “the great moral renovator of society”. He said “slavery cannot tolerate free speech”. Civil rights leaders argued time and again that their protests were protected free expression, and one noted: “nearly all the cases involving the civil rights movement were decided on First Amendment grounds”.
We’ve seen this globally too, where the ability to speak freely has been central in the fight for democracy worldwide. The most repressive societies have always restricted speech the most — and when people are finally able to speak, they often call for change. This year alone, people have used their voices to end multiple long-running dictatorships in Northern Africa. And we’re already hearing from voices in those countries that had been excluded just because they were women, or they believed in democracy.
Our idea of free expression has become much broader over even the last 100 years. Many Americans know about the Enlightenment history and how we enshrined the First Amendment in our constitution, but fewer know how dramatically our cultural norms and legal protections have expanded, even in recent history.
The first Supreme Court case to seriously consider free speech and the First Amendment was in 1919, Schenk vs the United States. Back then, the First Amendment only applied to the federal government, and states could and often did restrict your right to speak. Our ability to call out things we felt were wrong also used to be much more restricted. Libel laws used to impose damages if you wrote something negative about someone, even if it was true. The standard later shifted so it became okay as long as you could prove your critique was true. We didn’t get the broad free speech protections we have now until the 1960s, when the Supreme Court ruled in opinions like New York Times vs Sullivan that you can criticize public figures as long as you’re not doing so with actual malice, even if what you’re saying is false.
We now have significantly broader power to call out things we feel are unjust and share our own personal experiences. Movements like #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo went viral on Facebook — the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter was actually first used on Facebook — and this just wouldn’t have been possible in the same way before. 100 years back, many of the stories people have shared would have been against the law to even write down. And without the internet giving people the power to share them directly, they certainly wouldn’t have reached as many people. With Facebook, more than 2 billion people now have a greater opportunity to express themselves and help others.
While it’s easy to focus on major social movements, it’s important to remember that most progress happens in our everyday lives. It’s the Air Force moms who started a Facebook group so their children and other service members who can’t get home for the holidays have a place to go. It’s the church group that came together during a hurricane to provide food and volunteer to help with recovery. It’s the small business on the corner that now has access to the same sophisticated tools only the big guys used to, and now they can get their voice out and reach more customers, create jobs and become a hub in their local community. Progress and social cohesion come from billions of stories like this around the world.
People having the power to express themselves at scale is a new kind of force in the world — a Fifth Estate alongside the other power structures of society. People no longer have to rely on traditional gatekeepers in politics or media to make their voices heard, and that has important consequences. I understand the concerns about how tech platforms have centralized power, but I actually believe the much bigger story is how much these platforms have decentralized power by putting it directly into people’s hands. It’s part of this amazing expansion of voice through law, culture and technology.
So giving people a voice and broader inclusion go hand in hand, and the trend has been towards greater voice over time. But there’s also a counter-trend. In times of social turmoil, our impulse is often to pull back on free expression. We want the progress that comes from free expression, but not the tension.
We saw this when Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his famous letter from Birmingham Jail, where he was unconstitutionally jailed for protesting peacefully. We saw this in the efforts to shut down campus protests against the Vietnam War. We saw this way back when America was deeply polarized about its role in World War I, and the Supreme Court ruled that socialist leader Eugene Debs could be imprisoned for making an anti-war speech.
In the end, all of these decisions were wrong. Pulling back on free expression wasn’t the answer and, in fact, it often ended up hurting the minority views we seek to protect. From where we are now, it seems obvious that, of course, protests for civil rights or against wars should be allowed. Yet the desire to suppress this expression was felt deeply by much of society at the time.
Today, we are in another time of social tension. We face real issues that will take a long time to work through — massive economic transitions from globalization and technology, fallout from the 2008 financial crisis, and polarized reactions to greater migration. Many of our issues flow from these changes.
In the face of these tensions, once again a popular impulse is to pull back from free expression. We’re at another cross-roads. We can continue to stand for free expression, understanding its messiness, but believing that the long journey towards greater progress requires confronting ideas that challenge us. Or we can decide the cost is simply too great. I’m here today because I believe we must continue to stand for free expression.
At the same time, I know that free expression has never been absolute. Some people argue internet platforms should allow all expression protected by the First Amendment, even though the First Amendment explicitly doesn’t apply to companies. I’m proud that our values at Facebook are inspired by the American tradition, which is more supportive of free expression than anywhere else. But even American tradition recognizes that some speech infringes on others’ rights. And still, a strict First Amendment standard might require us to allow terrorist propaganda, bullying young people and more that almost everyone agrees we should stop — and I certainly do — as well as content like pornography that would make people uncomfortable using our platforms.
So once we’re taking this content down, the question is: where do you draw the line? Most people agree with the principles that you should be able to say things other people don’t like, but you shouldn’t be able to say things that put people in danger. The shift over the past several years is that many people would now argue that more speech is dangerous than would have before. This raises the question of exactly what counts as dangerous speech online. It’s worth examining this in detail.
Many arguments about online speech are related to new properties of the internet itself. If you believe the internet is completely different from everything before it, then it doesn’t make sense to focus on historical precedent. But we should be careful of overly broad arguments since they’ve been made about almost every new technology, from the printing press to radio to TV. Instead, let’s consider the specific ways the internet is different and how internet services like ours might address those risks while protecting free expression.
One clear difference is that a lot more people now have a voice — almost half the world. That’s dramatically empowering for all the reasons I’ve mentioned. But inevitably some people will use their voice to organize violence, undermine elections or hurt others, and we have a responsibility to address these risks. When you’re serving billions of people, even if a very small percent cause harm, that can still be a lot of harm.
We build specific systems to address each type of harmful content — from incitement of violence to child exploitation to other harms like intellectual property violations — about 20 categories in total. We judge ourselves by the prevalence of harmful content and what percent we find proactively before anyone reports it to us. For example, our AI systems identify 99% of the terrorist content we take down before anyone even sees it. This is a massive investment. We now have over 35,000 people working on security, and our security budget today is greater than the entire revenue of our company at the time of our IPO earlier this decade.
All of this work is about enforcing our existing policies, not broadening our definition of what is dangerous. If we do this well, we should be able to stop a lot of harm while fighting back against putting additional restrictions on speech.
Another important difference is how quickly ideas can spread online. Most people can now get much more reach than they ever could before. This is at the heart of a lot of the positive uses of the internet. It’s empowering that anyone can start a fundraiser, share an idea, build a business, or create a movement that can grow quickly. But we’ve seen this go the other way too — most notably when Russia’s IRA tried to interfere in the 2016 elections, but also when misinformation has gone viral. Some people argue that virality itself is dangerous, and we need tighter filters on what content can spread quickly.
For misinformation, we focus on making sure complete hoaxes don’t go viral. We especially focus on misinformation that could lead to imminent physical harm, like misleading health advice saying if you’re having a stroke, no need to go to the hospital.
More broadly though, we’ve found a different strategy works best: focusing on the authenticity of the speaker rather than the content itself. Much of the content the Russian accounts shared was distasteful but would have been considered permissible political discourse if it were shared by Americans — the real issue was that it was posted by fake accounts coordinating together and pretending to be someone else. We’ve seen a similar issue with these groups that pump out misinformation like spam just to make money.
The solution is to verify the identities of accounts getting wide distribution and get better at removing fake accounts. We now require you to provide a government ID and prove your location if you want to run political ads or a large page. You can still say controversial things, but you have to stand behind them with your real identity and face accountability. Our AI systems have also gotten more advanced at detecting clusters of fake accounts that aren’t behaving like humans. We now remove billions of fake accounts a year — most within minutes of registering and before they do much. Focusing on authenticity and verifying accounts is a much better solution than an ever-expanding definition of what speech is harmful.
Another qualitative difference is the internet lets people form communities that wouldn’t have been possible before. This is good because it helps people find groups where they belong and share interests. But the flip side is this has the potential to lead to polarization. I care a lot about this — after all, our goal is to bring people together.
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