Facebook CEO and billionaire Mark Zuckerberg is on Capitol Hill for the second day on Wednesday, testifying in front of lawmakers after a data scandal with the research firm Cambridge Analytica resulted in as many as 87 million Facebook users private data being compromised.
And while Zuckerberg was on the East Coast facing hours of questioning by Congressional leaders, another billionaire tech titan was on the West Coast revealing his thoughts.
“[W]henever there’s something that affects the public good, then there does need to be some form of public oversight,” Musk told to “CBS This Morning” co-host Gayle King on Tuesday in California.
“I think there should be regulations on social media to the degree that it negatively affects the public good. We can’t have like willy-nilly proliferation of fake news, that’s crazy,” he said.
“You can’t have more clicks on fake news than real news. That’s allowing public deception to go unchecked,” Musk told King, according to a clip of the interview published Wednesday. The full interview is set to air Thursday.
Zuckerberg himself has also indicated he is open to regulation.
“My position is not that there should be no regulation,” Zuckerberg said Tuesday in Congressional testimony. “I think the real question, as the internet becomes more important in people’s lives, is what is the right regulation, not whether there should be or not.”
In March, after news of the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke, Musk deleted the Facebook pages for both Tesla and SpaceX. He deleted the social media pages because Facebook “gives me the willies,” he said, not as a statement.
Musk is still relatively active on Instagram, which is owned by Facebook.
Musk also reiterated his warning about about artificial intelligence to King on Tuesday: “I do think that there should be some regulations on AI,” he said.
At the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, in March, Musk said the development of AI is more dangerous than nuclear warheads.
“I am not normally an advocate of regulation and oversight — I think one should generally err on the side of minimizing those things — but this is a case where you have a very serious danger to the public,” said Musk.
“It needs to be a public body that has insight and then oversight to confirm that everyone is developing AI safely. This is extremely important. I think the danger of AI is much greater than the danger of nuclear warheads by a lot and nobody would suggest that we allow anyone to build nuclear warheads if they want. That would be insane,” he said.
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