Facebook cannot guarantee no one will try to undermine EU elections

Facebook cannot guarantee that no users of the site will interfere in the European elections due to be held in May, but its CEO Mark Zuckerberg tried to reassure an audience that it is now much better at doing so than in 2016.

Following a groundswell of criticism in the wake of a scandal in 2018, when it was revealed that Russian operatives had used its platform to influence the US 2016 election results, Facebook has spent much of its time improving how it manages 'fake news' in order to safeguard the integrity of future votes.

In an interview with RTE, Zuckerberg said that there had been a lot of important elections since 2016 that have been relatively clean and assured his company was still trying to improve.

“We’ve certainly made a lot of progress [...] But no, I don’t think anyone can guarantee in a world where you have nation states that are trying to interfere in elections, there’s no single thing we can do and say okay we’ve now solved the issue,” he said.

“This is an ongoing arms race where we’re constantly building up our defenses and these sophisticated governments are also evolving their tactics.”

Ahead of the European vote on 26 May, Facebook has toughened its rules on political advertising in Europe, it’s fighting misinformation and will boost its fact checking.

“Here in the EU for the upcoming elections we are bringing the full battery of all of the strategies and tools that worked very well in a lot of important elections so far so I’ve a lot of confidence,” Zuckerberg said.

“But I think that we should expect that for some of these countries that are out there that are trying to interfere, they are just going to keep trying, so we need to stay ahead of that and keep on doing this work in order to stay ahead.”