MZ: So, here’s how we think about this. Facebook regularly testifies before Congress on a number of topics, most of which are not as high profile as the Russia investigation one recently. And our philosophy on this is: Our job is to get the government and Congress as much information as we can about anything that we know so they have a full picture, across companies, across the intelligence community, they can put that together and do what they need to do. So, if it is ever the case that I am the most informed person at Facebook in the best position to testify, I will happily do that. But the reason why we haven’t done that so far is because there are people at the company whose full jobs are to deal with legal compliance or some of these different things, and they’re just fundamentally more in the details on those things. So as long as it’s a substantive testimony where what folks are trying to get is as much content as possible, I’m not sure when I’ll be the right person. But I would be happy to if I were.

NT: OK. When you think about regulatory models, there’s a whole spectrum. There are kind of simple, limited things, like the Honest Ads Act, which would be more openness on ads. There’s the much more intense German model, or what France has certainly talked about. Or there's the ultimate extreme, like Sri Lanka, which just shut social media down. So when you think about the different models for regulation, how do you think about what would be good for Facebook, for its users, and for civic society?

MZ: Well, I mean, I think you’re framing this the right away, because the question isn’t “Should there be regulation or shouldn’t there be?” It’s “How do you do it?” And some of the ones, I think, are more straightforward. So take the Honest Ads Act. Most of the stuff in there, from what I’ve seen, is good. We support it. We’re building full ad transparency tools; even though it doesn’t necessarily seem like that specific bill is going to pass, we’re going to go implement most of it anyway. And that’s just because I think it will end up being good for our community and good for the internet if internet services live up to a lot of the same standards, and even go further than TV and traditional media have had to in advertising—that just seems logical.

There are some really nuanced questions, though, about how to regulate which I think are extremely interesting intellectually. So the biggest one that I’ve been thinking about is this question of: To what extent should companies have a responsibility to use AI tools to kind of self-regulate content? Here, let me kind of take a step back on this. When we got started in 2004 in a dorm room, there were two big differences about how we governed content on the service. Basically, back then people shared stuff and then they flagged it and we tried to look at it. But no one was saying, "Hey, you should be able to proactively know every time someone posts something bad," because the AI tech was much less evolved, and we were a couple of people in a dorm room. So I think people understood that we didn’t have a full operation that can go deal with this. But now you fast-forward almost 15 years and AI is not solved, but it is improving to the point where we can proactively identify a lot of content—not all of it, you know; some really nuanced hate speech and bullying, it’s still going to be years before we can get at—but, you know, nudity, a lot of terrorist content, we can proactively determine a lot of the time. And at the same time we’re a successful enough company that we can employ 15,000 people to work on security and all of the different forms of community [operations]. So I think there’s this really interesting question of: Now that companies increasingly over the next five to 10 years, as AI tools get better and better, will be able to proactively determine what might be offensive content or violate some rules, what therefore is the responsibility and legal responsibility of companies to do that? That, I think, is probably one of the most interesting intellectual and social debates around how you regulate this. I don’t know that it’s going to look like the US model with Honest Ads or any of the specific models that you brought up, but I think that getting that right is going to be one of the key things for the internet and AI going forward.