Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is “worried” that countries across the world may be trying to imitate China’s approach of regulating the internet, which “disregards” human rights.
In an hour-long conversation about threats posed by Covid-19 with European Union official Thierry Breton, Zuckerberg said the West should counter China with a “democratic” approach to the Internet.
“What I worry about is, right now I think there are emerging two very different frameworks underpinned by very different sets of values… Just to be blunt about it, I think there is a model coming out of countries like China that tend to have very different values than Western countries that are more democratic,” he said during an hour-long online event organized by the Centre on Regulation in Europe (CERRE).
“Right now a lot of other countries are looking at China… and saying their model gives a government more control over certain things. So, it might be attractive to force everyone to localise data, and you basically don’t have to respect human rights quite as much in how the society gets run. I think that’s really dangerous and I worry about that model spreading to other countries,” he said.
According to Zuckerberg, the best “antidote” to the Chinese model is to have a clear framework that comes out of Western democratic countries, which can become a “standard around the world”.
China has consistently ranked very low in “internet freedom” ranks. Freedom House, an American NGO, had ranked the country “least free” among a list of 65 countries. The report said China was “at the forefront of a global embrace of social media to manipulate elections and monitor citizens”.
He was answering a question about countries “regulating” content, and said governments and technology companies do need to engage in deeper partnerships. But he warned that there is a variance in how countries react to online content.
“There is a big question about balancing things like free expression and safety, privacy, competition. The question isn’t about regulation, but whose framework is going to win around the world,” he said.
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