Mark Zuckerbergs goal for 2018 is to fix Facebook when it comes to dealing with abuse and hate, fake news or interference by nation-states on the platform.
With the coming of the new year, many people generally make new resolutions for themselves. While the trend is very common, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has also set a personal challenge for 2018. His goal though might not be as personal as ours but it is seemingly to make lives better for others. Well, Zuckerberg’s goal for 2018 is to “fix Facebook” when it comes to dealing with abuse and hate, fake news or interference by nation-states on the platform.
In a Facebook post late Thursday, Zuckerberg said the world feels anxious and divided and Facebook has a lot of work to do when it comes to protecting its over 2 billion-strong community.
“My personal challenge for 2018 is to focus on fixing these important issues. We won’t prevent all mistakes or abuse, but we currently make too many errors enforcing our policies and preventing misuse of our tools. If we’re successful this year then we’ll end 2018 on a much better trajectory,” he posted.
“This may not seem like a personal challenge on its face, but I think I’ll learn more by focusing intensely on these issues than I would by doing something completely separate. These issues touch on questions of history, civics, political philosophy, media, government, and of course technology. I’m looking forward to bringing groups of experts together to discuss and help work through these topics,” he notes.
Just to recall, Facebook last year told US lawmakers that 126 million of its users might have seen content produced and circulated by Russian operatives during the 2016 US election. Facebook, along with Twitter, has also been warned of sanctions if it fails to provide all the necessary information to a British Parliamentary committee investigating Russian interference in the European Union referendum. Facebook has time until January 18 to hand over information the committee has requested.
Meanwhile, according to Zuckerberg, one of the most interesting questions in technology right now has been about centralization vs decentralization. “A lot of us got into technology because we believe it can be a decentralizing force that puts more power in people’s hands. (The first four words of Facebook’s mission have always been “give people the power”.) Back in the 1990s and 2000s, most people believed technology would be a decentralizing force,” he explained.
He is of the opinion that today, many people have lost faith in that promise. With the rise of a small number of big tech companies – and governments using technology to watch their citizens – many people now believe technology only centralizes power rather than decentralizes it.
Going forward, Zuckerberg is interested to go deeper and study the positive and negative aspects of these technologies, and how best to use them in Facebook’s services.
The Facebook CEO has also mentioned that this will be a serious year of self-improvement and he is looking forward to learning from working to fix the issues together. He has promised to “make sure that time spent on Facebook is time well spent”.
