Full Transcript: Mark Zuckerberg interviewed by Laurie Segall

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LAURIE SEGALL @ 00:01
I’m going to start with just a basic question Mark. What happened? And what went wrong?

MARK ZUCKERBERG @ 00:05
So this was a major breach of trust. And I’m really sorry that this happened. We have a basic responsibility to protect people’s data and if we can’t do that then we don’t deserve to have the opportunity to serve people.

MARK ZUCKERBERG @ 00:20
So our responsibility now is to make sure that this doesn’t happen again. And there were a few basic things that I think we need to do to ensure that.

MARK ZUCKERBERG @ 00:28
One is making sure that developers like Alexander Kogan who got access to a lot of information and then improperly used it just don’t get access to as much information going forward. So we are doing a set of things to restrict the amount of access that that that developers can get going forward.

MARK ZUCKERBERG @ 00:49
But the other is we need to make sure that there aren’t any other Cambridge Analyticas out there. Right. Or folks who have improperly accessed data. So we’re going to go now and investigate every app that has access to a large amount of information from before we walk down our platform. And if we detect any suspicious activity we’re going to do a full forensic audit.

LAURIE SEGALL @ 01:13
Facebook has asked us to share our data to share our lives on this platform and as wanted us to be transparent. And people don’t feel like they’ve received that same amount of transparency. They’re wondering what’s happening to their data. Can they trust Facebook.

MARK ZUCKERBERG @ 01:28
So one of the most important things that I think we need to do here is make sure that we tell everyone whose data was affected by one of these rogue apps. And we’re going to do that. We’re going to build a tool where anyone can go and see if their data was a part of this.

LAURIE SEGALL @ 01:42
So the 50 million people that were impacted they will be able to tell if they were impacted.

MARK ZUCKERBERG @ 01:47
Yeah. We’re going to be even conservative on that. So you know we may not have all the data in our system today so anyone who’s data might have been affected by this. We’re going to we’re going to make sure that we tell.

MARK ZUCKERBERG @ 01:57
And going forward when we when we identify apps that they are similarly doing sketchy things we’re going to make sure that we tell people then too. Right. That’s definitely something that we’re looking back on this. You know I regret that we didn’t do at the time and I think we got that wrong and we’re committed to getting that right going forward.

LAURIE SEGALL @ 02:18
I want to ask about that because when this came to light you guys knew this a long time ago that this data was out there. Why didn’t you tell users? Don’t you think users have the right to know that their data is being used for different purposes?

MARK ZUCKERBERG @ 02:32
So yes and let me tell you what we what actions we took. So in 2015 some journalists from The Guardian told us that they had had seen or had some evidence that data that this app developer Alexander Kogan who build this personality quiz app and a bunch of people used it and share data with it had had sold that data to Cambridge Analytica and a few other firms.

MARK ZUCKERBERG @ 02:56
And when we heard that and that’s against the policies you can share data in a way that that people don’t know or don’t consent to. We immediately banned Kogan zap. And further we made it so that Kogan and Cambridge Analytica and the other folks who with whom we shared the data.

MARK ZUCKERBERG @ 03:16
We asked for a formal certification that they had none of the data from anyone in the Facebook community that they had deleted it. If they had it and that they weren’t using it. And they all provided that certification. So as far as we understood around the time of that episode there was no data out there.

LAURIE SEGALL @ 03:35
So why in Facebook follow up you know you say certified and I think why wasn’t there more of a follow why wasn’t there an audit then? Why does it take a big media report to take it that proactive approach?

LAURIE SEGALL @ 03:47
Well I mean I don’t know about you but I’m used too when people legally certify that they’re going to do something that they do it. But I think that this was clearly a mistake in retrospect.

LAURIE SEGALL @ 03:59
Was putting too much trust in developers?

MARK ZUCKERBERG @ 04:01
I mean I think it did. And that’s why you know we need to make sure that we don’t make that mistake ever again which is why one of the things that I announced today is that we’re going to do a full investigation into every app that had access to a large amount of data from around this time before we locked down the platform.

MARK ZUCKERBERG @ 04:19
And we’re now not just going to take people’s word for it. And when they give us a legal certification but if we see anything suspicious which I think that there probably were signs in this case that we could have looked into. We’re going to do a full forensic audit.

LAURIE SEGALL @ 04:33
How do you know there aren’t hundreds more companies like Cambridge Analytica that are also keeping data that violates Facebook’s policies?

MARK ZUCKERBERG @ 04:43
Well I think the question here is do our app developers who people have given access to their data are they doing something that people don’t want or are they selling the data in a way that people don’t want. Are they giving it to someone that they don’t have authorization to do.

MARK ZUCKERBERG @ 04:58
And this is something that I think we don’t need to go figure out. Right. So for all these apps.

@ 05:03
That’s gotta be a hard. I gotta to say that’s gonna be really challenging ordeal. How do you actually go do that because you talk about it being years ago and then you guys have made it a bit stricter for that kind of information to be shared. But backtracking on it’s got to be really difficult to find out where that data has gone and what other companies have shady access.

MARK ZUCKERBERG @ 05:22
Yeah I mean so as you say I mean the good news here is that we already changed the platform policies in 2014. But before that we know what the apps were that had access to data.

MARK ZUCKERBERG @ 05:32
We know how much. How many people were using those services and we can look at the patterns of their data requests and based on that we think we’ll have a pretty clear sense of whether anyone was doing anything abnormal and we’ll be able to do a full audit of anyone who is questionable.

LAURIE SEGALL @ 05:53
Do you expect do you have any scale or any scope of what you expect to find? Anything in the scope of what happened with Cambridge Analytica where you had 50 million users?

MARK ZUCKERBERG @ 06:01
Well it’s hard to know what we’ll find but we’re going to review thousands of apps. So. This is going to be an intensive process. This is important. I mean this is something that in retrospect we clearly should have done upfront with Cambridge Analytica we should not have trusted the certification that they gave us and we’re not going to make that mistake again.

MARK ZUCKERBERG @ 06:23
This is our responsibility to our community just to make sure that we secure the data that they’re sharing.

MARK ZUCKERBERG @ 06:29
If you told me in 2004 when I was getting started with Facebook that a big part of my responsibility today would be to help protect the integrity of elections against interference by other governments. You know I wouldn’t have really believed that that was going to be something that I would have to work on fourteen years later.

LAURIE SEGALL @ 06:48
I’m going to challenge you but we’re here now.

LAURIE SEGALL @ 06:49
I’m going to challenge you.

MARK ZUCKERBERG @ 06:50
We’re going to make sure that we do a good job at it.

LAURIE SEGALL @ 06:51
Have you done a good enough job yet?

MARK ZUCKERBERG @ 06:54
Well I think we will see. But you know I think what’s clear is that in 2016 we were not as on top of a number of issues as we should have. Whether it was Russian interference or fake news. But what we have seen since then is you know a number of months later there was a major French election.

MARK ZUCKERBERG @ 07:11
And there we deployed some AI tools that did a much better job of identifying Russian bots and basically Russian potential interference and weeding that out of the platform ahead of the election.

MARK ZUCKERBERG @ 07:25
And we were we were much happier with how that went. In 2017 last year during a special election in the Senate seat in Alabama. We deployed some new AI tools that we built to detect fake accounts that were trying to spread false news and we found a lot of different accounts coming from Macedonia.

MARK ZUCKERBERG @ 07:43
So you know I think the reality here is that this isn’t rocket science. I mean there’s a lot of hard work that we need to do to make it harder for nation states like Russia to do election interference, to make it so that trolls and other folks can’t spread fake news.

MARK ZUCKERBERG @ 08:01
But we can get in front of this and we have a responsibility to do this not only for the 2018 midterms in the U.S. which are going to be a huge deal this year. And that’s just a huge focus of us. But there’s a big election in India this year. There’s a big election in Brazil. There are big elections around the world.

MARK ZUCKERBERG @ 08:16
And you can bet that we are really committed to doing everything that we need to to make sure that the integrity of those elections on Facebook is secured.

LAURIE SEGALL @ 08:25
I can hear that commitment. But since I gotcha here. Do you think that bad actors are using Facebook at this moment to meddle with the with the U.S. midterm elections?

MARK ZUCKERBERG @ 08:36
I’m sure someone’s trying right. I’m sure that there’s no v2 version 2 of whatever the Russian effort was in 2016. I’m sure they’re working on that and they’re going to be some new tactics that we need to make sure that we observe and get in front of them.

LAURIE SEGALL @ 08:54
Speaking of getting in front of him do you know what they are? Do you have any idea?

MARK ZUCKERBERG @ 08:56
Yes and I think we have some sense of the different things that we need to get in front of.

LAURIE SEGALL @ 09:02
Are you specifically saying bad actors trying to meddle with the U.S. election now?

MARK ZUCKERBERG @ 09:08
I’m not 100 percent sure what that means because I mean it’s not. I think that the candidates are and.

LAURIE SEGALL @ 09:13
Are you seeing anything new or interesting?

MARK ZUCKERBERG @ 09:15
What we see what we see are a lot of folks trying to sow division. So that was a major tactic that we saw Russia try to use in the 2016 election. Actually most of what they did was not directly as far as we can tell from the data that we’ve seen was not directly about the election but was more about just dividing people.

MARK ZUCKERBERG @ 09:36
They’d run a group on you know for pro immigration reform and then they’d run another group against immigration reform and just try to pit people against each other. And a lot of this was done with fake accounts that we can do a better job of tracing and using AI tools to to scan and observe a lot of what is going on. And I’m confident that we’re going to do a much better job.

LAURIE SEGALL @ 10:00
Lawmakers in the United States and the UK are asking you to testify. Everybody wants you to show up. Will you testify before Congress?

MARK ZUCKERBERG @ 10:10
So the short answer is I’m happy to if it’s the right thing to do. You know Facebook testifies in Congress regularly on a number of topics some high profile and some not. And our objective is always to provide Congress of this extremely important job. To have the most information that they can. We see a small slice of activity on Facebook.

MARK ZUCKERBERG @ 10:34
But Congress gets to have access to the information across Facebook and all other companies in the intelligence community and everything. So what we try to do is send the person at Facebook who will have the most knowledge about what Congress is trying to learn.

MARK ZUCKERBERG @ 10:50
So if that’s me then I’m happy to go on what I think we found so far is that typically there are people whose whole job is focused on an area. But I would imagine at some point that that there will be a topic where I am the sole authority on and it will make sense for me to do it and I don’t have to do that.

LAURIE SEGALL @ 11:06
You are the brand of Facebook you are the name the Facebook people want to hear from you.

MARK ZUCKERBERG @ 11:10
And that’s why I’m doing this interview. But you know I think that there is the question in a in a question of congressional testimony is what is the goal. Right. And that’s not a media opportunity right or at least it’s not supposed to be.

MARK ZUCKERBERG @ 11:24
The goal there I think has to get Congress all of the information that they need to do their extremely important job. And we just want to make sure that we send whoever is best informed at doing that.

MARK ZUCKERBERG @ 11:33
I agree separately that there’s an element of accountability where I should be out there doing more interviews. And you know as uncomfortable as it is for me to do you know a TV interview. It’s I think this is an important thing that is a discipline for what we’re doing. I I should be out there and being being asked hard questions by journalists.

LAURIE SEGALL @ 11:54
Knowing what you know now do you believe Facebook impacted the results of the 2016 election?

MARK ZUCKERBERG @ 11:58
Oh that’s that is hard. You know I think that it is it’s really hard for me to have a full assessment of that. You know it’s the reality is well there are so many different forces at play where the organic posting that people did. The get out the vote campaigns that we ran the pages that both candidates ran the advertising that they did.

MARK ZUCKERBERG @ 12:23
I’m sure that all of that activity had some impact. It’s hard for me to assess how much that’s stacked up compared to all the campaign events and advertising that was done off of Facebook and all the other efforts. And I think it’s also a hard to fully assess the impact of that organic activity which we’re actually quite proud of right now.

LAURIE SEGALL @ 12:45
Also the bad actors.

MARK ZUCKERBERG @ 12:46
And the bad stuff. That’s right. So I think it is. It’s hard to fully assess.

LAURIE SEGALL @ 12:51
Given the stakes here why in Facebook the regulated?

MARK ZUCKERBERG @ 12:55
I actually I’m not sure we shouldn’t be regulated. You know I think in general technology is an increasing increasingly important trend in the world. And I actually think the question is more what is the right regulation rather than yes or no should it be regulated.

LAURIE SEGALL @ 13:13
What’s the right regulation?

MARK ZUCKERBERG @ 13:15
Well there are some some basic things that I think that there are some big intellectual debates on on the the basic side. You know there are things like ads transparency regulation that I would love to see.

MARK ZUCKERBERG @ 13:26
If you look at how much regulation there is around advertising on TV and print it’s not clear why there should be less on the Internet where you should have the same level of transparency required.

MARK ZUCKERBERG @ 13:37
And I don’t know if a bill is going to pass. I know a couple of senators are working really hard on this but we’re committed and we’ve actually already started rolling out ad transparency tools that accomplish most of the things that are in all the bills that the people are talking about today because we just think that this is an important thing.

MARK ZUCKERBERG @ 13:54
People should know who is buying the ads that they see on Facebook then you should build to go to any page and see all the ads that people are running to different audiences.

LAURIE SEGALL @ 14:02
How is being a father changed changed your commitment to users changed your commitment to their future and what kinder of Facebook looks like.?

MARK ZUCKERBERG @ 14:13
I think having kids changes a lot.

LAURIE SEGALL @ 14:15
Like what?

MARK ZUCKERBERG @ 14:17
Well you know I used to think that the most important thing to me by far was my having the greatest positive impact across the world that I can. Now I really just care about building something that my my girls are going to grow up and be proud of me for.

MARK ZUCKERBERG @ 14:37
And I mean that’s what what is kind of my guiding philosophy at this point is you know and I you know come and work on a lot of hard things during the day and I go home and just ask will my girls be proud of what I did today.