Facebook safety and terrorism exec rejects claims users are turning away from the service
Facebook’s head of global policy management, Monika Bickert, has rejected suggestions people are turning off the service due to bad behaviour by both the social media’s users and its leadership, expressing optimism about social media’s role in society.
Bickert, the leader of Facebook’s global team overseeing what types of content can be shared on Facebook, was in Sydney as part of a global tour to explain the service’s moderation policies and their development.
Facebook’s Bickert: “I think overwhelmingly this tool can be used for good”
During the media briefing, Bickert was dismissive of concerns about the effects of Facebook’s flat lining user growth and the social media’s service tumbling trust figures, after the service fell 37 places in Futurebrand’s 2018 brand sentiment index.
“In terms of growth, we are still growing naturally in markets where there’s a lot of saturation we’re going to start to plateau. I think in Australia we have more than sixteen million regular users and the population’s around 25 million,” she said.
“You’re naturally going to see that plateau. But we are still growing.”
Update: A spokesperson later clarified that Facebook has 16 million Australian monthly active users and 13 million active daily users.
Last month, Facebook reported its North American daily average user figure remained at 185m, a level unchanged for a year, while in Europe it dropped for the second successive quarter to 278m. Despite the flatlining in key regions, the company still grew revenues by 33% for the quarter.
Bickert rejected a suggestion from Mumbrella that senior management would prioritise revenues over user safety, saying: “No. In fact I will say that when we talk about things like terror propaganda or hate speech with senior leadership, the conversation is about ‘how do make sure this is a good experience for users?’, that this is a safe place for people to spend time.”
“Senior leadership will get involved in these sort of things. We’ll have a big content issue we’ll have to decide: how we’re going to treat hate speech for example. We will involve Mark, Sheryl, other senior leaders in those conversations and make sure they have a voice in what we’re doing.”
Her visit to Australia comes as the company deals with the fallout from a New York Times story detailing how founder Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg attempted to stall and discredit critics of the company following the Cambridge Analytica and Russian interference scandals.
Bickert also described the lessons the service had learned from the 2016 US Presidential election: “In terms of preparation, we’re in far better shape. In terms of account tools alone. The technical tools that are now removing content at upload – affecting a million accounts a day – that’s something we didn’t have before.
“In terms of behaviour, things have gotten more sophisticated. We’ve seen groups that have tried to copycat what the Russians did in 2016.
“We now have an elections integrity team, they work with our information operations team, and the goal is for any country where there are elections called, making sure Facebook has the team working together and getting together the likely risk from security firms and election officials.”
When asked by Mumbrella about the comments of Salesforce’s founder, Marc Benioff, that Facebook is akin the ‘new cigarettes’, and general concerns around social media’s corrosive effects with ‘fake news’, misinformation and abuse, Bickert was upbeat.
“Bad behaviour has existed for a long time. Social media gives media an amplification tool and that amplification tool can be misused. So that is why I have a job. At the same time I think overwhelmingly this tool can be used for good.
“When I think about people here, they come to Facebook for good reasons. Sites like Facebook, Twitter and others have given voices to those in the past who would not have had any power and, for me, that’s something we have to work very hard to protect.”
