Watch: Mark Zuckerberg tells Joe Rogan that Facebook spends more than "defence budgets of most countries" on "community integrity work"
On a new episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta Platforms, joined Joe Rogan to discuss a variety of topics. One of which was Facebook's defense system, which Zuckerberg revealed is of astronomical proportion for the social media network.
The 'defense system' being all the human resources and systems that the company employs to help uphold the online community's integrity and standards. Zuckerberg disclosed to Joe Rogan that they employ "tens of thousands" of people for this purpose, and that the yearly budget is upwards of $5 billion:
"I mean at this point we have like tens of thousands of people working on this at the company. I think we spend like 5 billion dollars a year was the last stat on sort of all this community integrity work... Our kind of defense budget, just to put the numbers in perspective, is bigger than the defense budget of probably most countries. But it's obviously a super critical part of what we need to do."
Creating a global platform that has reached the heights that Facebook has is both a tremendous feat but an enormous responsibility as well. It is reassuring to know that Zuckerberg seems to take the integrity and safety of the community seriously. Although it is crazy to think about how Facebook's defenses are better funded than most of the world's countries.
You can see the excerpt from the JRE below:
"When we take down something that we're not supposed to, that's the worst" - Mark Zuckerberg to Joe Rogan on censoring media
On the same episode of JRE, Joe Rogan asked Zuckerberg about censoring big stories, and referenced the 2020 US Presidential election, when Facebook and Twitter censored a story from the New York Post. The story had to do with e-mails allegedly found on a laptop abandoned by the now-president's son Hunter Biden.
The e-mails suggested corruption on the part of President's son, and Facebook chose to censor the story. Zuckerberg stated that the reason for this was because of a warning they received from the FBI.
"When we take down something that we're not supposed to, that's the worst... The background here is that the FBI came to us - some folks on our team - and was like 'Hey, just so you know, you should be on high alert. We thought there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election, we have it on notice that basically there's about to be some kind of dump that's similar to that'."
You can watch an extended excerpt here: