And most people can now get much more reached than they could before and this is at the heart of a lot of the positive uses of the Internet.
It's empowering that anyone can now start a fundraiser, share an idea, build a business, start a movement that can grow quickly.
But we've seen this go the other way too.
And most notably in 2016, when the Russian IRA Tried to interfere in our elections.
But we've also seen this when people share misinformation that goes viral.
Now some people argue that virility itself is dangerous and that we need much tighter filter on what ideas and content are allowed to spread.
And for misinformation, we do focus on making sure that complete hoaxes don't go viral.
And we especially focused on misinformation that can lead to imminent physical harm, like misleading health advice, saying if you're having a stroke, no need to go to the hospital just prick your finger and you'll be fine.
That's dangerous.
We need to address that.
But more broadly, we've actually found that in different strategy work the best, and that is focusing on the authenticity of the speaker rather than trying to judge the content itself.
Much of a content that those Russian account shared that was distasteful.
But it would have been considered permissable political discourse if it had been shared by real American citizens.
So the real issue is that it was posted by fake accounts that were coordinating together and pretending to be people that they were not.
And we've seen similar issues with these groups that pump out misinformation like spam just to make money.
So the solution here is to verify the identity as anyone who's getting a wide amount of distribution and to get a lot better at identifying and taking down fake accounts.
So we now require you to provide a government ID and to prove your location if you want to run political ads, or if you're gonna run a large page, you can still say controversial things.
If you want But you have to stand behind them with your real identity and face accountability.
I don't think most people want to live in a world where you can only post things that tech companies judge to be 100% true.
So we recently clarified our policies to ensure that people could primary source speech from political figures that shapes our civic discourse.
Political advertising is more transparent on Facebook than anywhere else.
And we keep all political and issue ads in an archive so everyone can scrutinize them for years to come.
And that's something that no TV or print does.
And we don't we don't fact check political ads and we don't do this to help politicians.
But because we think people should be able to see for themselves what politicians are saying.
And for the same reason, if content is newsworthy, we also won't take it down, even it would otherwise conflict with some of our standards.
Now, I know many people disagree with us.
But in general, I don't think it's right for a private company to censor politicians or the news in a democracy.
See, now i'm committed to the values that we're discussing today, but we won't always get it right.
I understand that people are concerned about how much control we have over how people communicate on our services and and i understand people are concerned about bias and making sure that their ideas are treated fairly.
Frankly, I don't think that we should be making so many important decisions about speech on our own either.
And we benefit from a more democratic process and clear rules for the Internet, and some new institutions.
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So that's why we're establishing an independent oversight board.
For people to appeal our content decisions, the board is going to have the power to make final binding decisions about whether content stays up or comes down across our services and these are going to be decisions that our team and i cannot overturn.
And we're going to appoint members to the sport to have a diversity of views and backgrounds But we each hold free expression as a paramount value.
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And building this institution is important to me personally, cuz I'm not always gonna be here
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And I want to ensure that these values of voice and free expression Aren't trying to deeply into how this company is deviant.
