Mark Zuckerberg has a massive new problem to deal with
When Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg first founded his social media website in February 2004 as a way to connect with other Harvard students, he likely never could have dreamed of the challenges he’d have to face as it changed and grew.
Now, 21 years later, Facebook lives under the umbrella of Meta Platforms, the company that Zuckerberg created to gather all of his properties. It also includes Instagram, WhatsApp, and the Meta Reality Labs, which makes the Meta Quest product line.
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Zuckerberg is no stranger to challenges, of course — he’s had to navigate many to make his company as successful as it is. Despite many claiming they no longer use the platform, Facebook alone still has more than 3 billion active monthly users, making it by far the biggest social media platform out there.
The Facebook founder has been fighting a new kind of challenge lately. His company is at the center of an antitrust case from the Federal Communications Commission, which has accused the technology company of buying its rivals as a way to eliminate competition and keep itself in power.
Related: Surprising earnings send Meta Platforms stock soaring
That trial is ongoing, but while Zuckerberg fights it, it looks as if a new bill signed by President Trump will need to be next on his agenda, because it presents a problem that will be very hard for Meta to solve in a timely manner.
Image source: Xinhua/Liu Jie via Getty Images
Deepfakes, revenge porn, and social media
Called the Take It Down act, the bill signed by President Trump on May 19 introduces strict penalties for the distribution of a variety of disturbing content, including deepfakes and revenge porn.
The bill states that, regardless of whether the content is real or generated by AI, the publisher of said content will face criminal penalties that include fines, imprisonment, and more.
Related: Meta Whistleblower reveals disturbing secrets in testimony
The new bill also gives a specific time frame for social media companies and other online platforms to remove the content: 48 hours after the victim of the content gives the company notice that it has been published.
Trump appeared alongside wife Melania for a signing ceremony of the bill on Monday. The first lady played a key role in pushing the bill through Congress, with White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt telling reporters Monday that the first lady was “instrumental in getting this important legislation passed.”
Why this is a problem for Mark Zuckerberg
Dealing with bad actors is a massive issue for any social media platform, but both deepfakes and revenge porn demand significant manpower to appropriately handle in a timely manner.
Many victims of revenge porn have stated that they reached out to the platforms they appeared on, only to hear nothing back. These reports have resulted in bold stances from platforms such as Meta and Snap (Snapchat’s owner) against the distribution of such content.
In a 2021 post on the Meta official site under its news section, Meta announced that it was supporting the UK Revenge Porn’s helpline as well as its website, StopNCII.org. The website offers a way for victims to report that they’ve been targeted by revenge porn and open a case to investigate.
In 2024, 49% of businesses globally reported incidents of deepfake fraud, according to a Regula study. And that doesn’t even count the number of people using deepfake technology to create revenge porn.
In other words, Meta now has a real humdinger of a problem on its hands, as does Elon Musk’s X, Snapchat, and TikTok. Unless they’ve already trained an AI army to identify and squash deepfakes and revenge porn at the speed of light, it’s highly likely that the consequences mapped out in the Take It Down act will be coming their way,
Related: Meta’s AI ambitions suffer a setback
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