In an exclusive interview, Laurie Segall, CNN’s Senior Tech Correspondent, asked Facebook’s founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, “Do you think that bad actors are using Facebook at this moment to meddle with the US midterm elections?”
Zuckerberg quickly answered, “I’m sure someone’s trying. I’m sure that there’s version 2 of whatever the Russian effort was in 2016. I’m sure they’re working on that and there are going to be some new tactics that we make sure that we observe and get in front of.”
When asked by Ms. Segall if he knows what these tactics are, Mr. Zuckerberg admitted that Facebook has an idea of these tactics, and talked about what the company is doing about it.
He said that many people within Facebook are both building new technology and amping up security measures on the social media platform. Mr. Zuckerberg explained that one of the big commitments the company has made is to double the number of people working on security issues. By the end of 2018, he said, there will be 20,000 people working on security and content review for Facebook.
At present there are already 15,000 people working on content review and security.
“I think the combination of building the right tools to identify different patterns across all of our products and having people to review them at the scale and speed that we need is going to be a good formula. But security isn’t a problem that you ever fully solve. You can get to a level where you are better than your adversaries, and they continue evolving, so we are going to be working on this forever, as long as this community remains an important thing in the world.”