New year, new Zuck: Facebook CEO's personal challenge to spend 2018 fixing social network's woes
Facebook founder and chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg released a blog post for its billions of users, admitting that the social network has a "lot of work to do."
Mark Zuckerberg promised that in 2018, he'll focus on issues ailing the social network, like abuse and fake news
Zuckerberg's post reflected on the personal goals he'd over the years since the platform matured into the behemoth it is now. "My personal challenge for 2018," he said, "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."
Misuse of Facebook's "tools" manifested in areas such as fake news stories propagating throughout the site. This has brought up concerns of brand safety and have raised eyebrows throughout the media ecosystem. Last month, Guardian editor-in-chief Katherine Viner took aim at Facebook's allowance to let these false stories threaten the truth and good journalism. Ad revenue may not be one of the platforms issues, but as Buzzfeed chief executive Jonah Peretti said in a post to his employees, Facebook is paying content creators "far too little for the value they deliver to users."
Zuckerberg explained that this decision "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." He stated that the problems facing the platform touch on matters of history, civics, political philosophy, media, government, "and of course technology."
He cited what he considered a major issue facing technology: decentralization v centralization. As the few large corporations like his, Amazon, Google, and now international forces like Tencent, continue to grow, "many people now believe technology only centralizes power rather than decentralizes it."
The instability of the growing cryptocurrency market, and surveillance from federal government added to the fires that affect the social platform for years to come. Zuckerberg planned to "go deeper" into studying the affects currencies like Etherium and Bitcoin, and to assemble a team of experts to discuss and work through these issues.
"This will be a serious year of self-improvement," he closed his statement, "and I'm looking forward to learning from working to fix our issues together."