Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has urged leaders in the West to avoid recreating China’s internet censorship model which he labeled as “really dangerous.”
CNBC reports that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg discussed China’s internet censorship model in a recent live stream, urging the West to avoid following a similar model, calling it “really dangerous.”
The CEO stated in a livestreamed discussion with E.U. official Thierry Breton: “What I worry about is, right now I think there are emerging two very different frameworks underpinned by very different sets of values.”
Zuckerberg continued: “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.”
Zuckerberg added that Western countries should counter China’s approach with a democratic alternative, praising Brussels’ overhaul of its privacy laws in 2018. Zuckerberg claimed that those reforms prompted Facebook to change its data privacy approach worldwide.
He further stated that the “best antidote” to China’s approach “is having a clear framework that comes out of Western democratic countries and that can become a standard around the world.”
Zuckerberg has previously called out China for its censorship practices, accusing Chinese-owned video sharing platform TikTok of censorship by limiting the mention of the recent Hong Kong protests.
“I worry about that kind of model spreading to other countries,” Zuckerberg said. “And I think that the best antidote to that is having a clear framework that comes out of Western democratic countries and that can become a standard around the world.”
During the conversation with Breton, Zuckerberg added that he felt cooperation between tech firms and the government was “inevitable,” stating: “I think there are big questions around balancing things like free expression and safety. I don’t think that there’s a question that there’s going to be regulation. I think the question is, whose framework is going to win around the world?”
Read more at CNBC here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or contact via secure email at the address lucasnolan@protonmail.com
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