FACEBOOK CEO MARK ZUCKERBERG SPEAKS ABOUT REGULATING HARMFUL CONTENT ONLINE

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has pitched for a legal framework that encourages "democratic and open values" to control social media platforms in order to regulate harmful content online. He said that social media companies need more guidance and regulation from governments, speaking at the Munich Security Conference in Germany on Saturday.

"I do think that there should be regulation on harmful content ... there's a question about which framework you use for this. 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 create trust and better governance of the internet and will benefit everyone, including us over the long term. 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," Zuckerberg said.

Notably, Facebook and its family of apps such as WhatsApp has been facing the ire of companies over spread of false and misleading information.

"Right now, there are two frameworks that I think people have for existing industries -- there's like newspapers and existing media, and then there's the telco-type model, which is 'the data just flows through you', but you're not going to hold a telco responsible if someone says something harmful on a phone line. I actually think where we should be is somewhere in between," he said.

Zuckerberg said Facebook has employed 35,000 people to review online content and implement security measures. "Our budget is bigger today than the whole revenue of the company when we went public in 2012 when we had a billion users," he said.