Founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Facebook Inc., Mark Zuckerberg has said the topnotch social media firm “has a lot of work to do” in the year 2018.
The Facebook CEO made this known in a statement today in what seems to be the platform’s manifesto for the year.
“Today feels a lot like that first year. The world feels anxious and divided, and Facebook has a lot of work to do — whether it’s protecting our community from abuse and hate, defending against interference by nation states, or making sure that time spent on Facebook is time well spent,” Zuckerberg stated.
He explained that 2018 for him would be a personal challenge year in which his firm will 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 said.
“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,” he further stated.
He revealed that Facebook would be bringing groups of experts together to discuss and help work through these key issues.
“For example, one of the most interesting questions in technology right now is 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.
“But 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,” he said.
“There are important counter-trends to this –like encryption and cryptocurrency — that take power from centralized systems and put it back into people’s hands.
“But they come with the risk of being harder to control. I’m interested to go deeper and study the positive and negative aspects of these technologies, and how best to use them in our services.
“This will be a serious year of self-improvement and I’m looking forward to learning from working to fix our issues together,” he added.