MUNICH — Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Saturday that social media companies need more guidance and regulation from governments in order to tackle the growing problem of harmful online content.
"Even if I'm not going to agree with every regulation in the near term, I do think it's going to be the thing that helps creates trust and better governance of the internet and will benefit everyone, including us over the long term," Zuckerberg told an audience at the Munich Security Conference.
"In the absence of that kind of regulation, we will continue doing our best, we are going to build up the muscle to do it, to basically find stuff as proactively as possible," he said, adding that he did not want Facebook to contribute to polarization or misinformation.
"To the contrary, I want us to be a force for bringing people closer together," he said at the annual security forum.
Facebook has dealt with a number of headaches over the past few years. The company had to overcome the fallout from Russian interference during the 2016 U.S. presidential election, 2018's Cambridge Analytica scandal and the launch of four separate antitrust-focused investigations in the U.S. into the company in 2019.
The tech boss said he now employs 35,000 people to review online content and that his teams currently suspend more than a million fake accounts each day. The social media giant has previously said that the number of users continues to grow, claiming 2.9 billion monthly users across its family of apps.
While in Europe, Zuckerberg is expected to take meetings with European politicians in Munich and Brussels to discuss data practices, regulation and tax reform.
"My goal for this next decade isn't to be liked, but to be understood," Zuckerberg said on the company's earnings call in January.
Zuckerberg also spoke at the Silicon Slopes Tech Summit 2020 in Salt Lake City, Utah, earlier this month, saying that he expects the company's new honesty-first approach is "going to piss off a lot of people."
Salvador Rodriguez contributed to this report from CNBC's bureau in San Francisco.