He’s no fool. In an essay for the Washington Post, Zuckerberg calls for more regulation.

In brief, Mr Zuckerberg calls for the following things:

• Common rules that all social media sites need to adhere to, enforced by third-party bodies, to control the spread of harmful content

• All major tech companies to release a transparency report every three months, to put it on a par with financial reporting

• Stronger laws around the world to protect the integrity of elections, with common standards for all websites to identify political actors

• Laws that not only apply to candidates and elections, but also other “divisive political issues”, and for laws to apply outside of official campaign periods

• New industry-wide standards to control how political campaigns use data to target voters online

• More countries to adopt privacy laws like the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which came into force last year

• A “common global framework” that means these laws are all standardised globally, rather than being substantially different from country to country

• Clear rules about who’s responsible for protecting people’s data when they move it from one service to another

This is a game that has been played for centuries. Now that Facebook sits atop the industry, Zuckerberg is advocating to freeze the structure and increase the barriers to entry. Complex legal structures with substantial financial liability for violations makes it impossible for all but the biggest and wealthiest of companies to comply.