Mark Zuckerberg Resolves to 'Fix' Facebook in 2018
January 04 2018 - 5:54PM
Dow Jones News
By Deepa Seetharaman
For years, Mark Zuckerberg has announced an annual personal
challenge, from slaughtering his own meat to learning Mandarin to
building his own artificial intelligence. His 2018 task may be the
most ambitious yet: Fix Facebook Inc.
In a Facebook post Thursday that highlights his company's
mounting difficulties, Mr. Zuckerberg said Facebook has made "too
many errors enforcing our policies and preventing misuse of our
tools." The Facebook chief executive, a self-described optimist
about technology, said promising tools like encryption and
cryptocurrency could help counter concerns about the growing power
of tech giants, but added that they, too, carried risks that needed
to be deliberated.
"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," Mr.
Zuckerberg wrote. "My personal challenge for 2018 is to focus on
fixing these important issues."
The goal shows how starkly Facebook's situation has changed. In
January 2017, even as criticism was growing about Facebook's role
in spreading fake news and divisiveness during the U.S.
presidential election, he unveiled plans for a series of trips
across the country to talk to Americans about their lives and work.
The tour sparked speculation that Mr. Zuckerberg might want to run
for president.
Now Mr. Zuckerberg is focused on addressing a mountain of risks
that threaten to damage the company he co-founded in 2004 as a
service for Harvard University students. Today, more than two
billion people log into Facebook every month and it is one of the
world's most valuable and influential companies -- power that is
now drawing enormous scrutiny.
Over the past 18 months, Facebook has been lambasted for
allowing objectionable content, including violent live videos, and
fabricated news articles to proliferate on its service.
Last fall, Facebook lurched into crisis mode after disclosing
that Russia-backed entities used its platform and advertising tools
to spread divisive messages to disrupt the 2016 U.S. presidential
campaign. This admission sparked a rare set of hearings on Capitol
Hill during which lawmakers grilled officials from Facebook,
Twitter Inc. and Alphabet Inc.'s Google.
More recently, several former Facebook executives and employees
have expressed remorse for helping build a platform that they said
was designed to foster dependence on Facebook. Those comments
eventually prompted Facebook to acknowledge that certain types of
social-media use could be harmful to users' mental health.
Mr. Zuckerberg said in Thursday's post that the current national
mood resembles that of 2009, when he mounted his first personal
challenge by wearing a tie every day. At the time, the U.S. economy
was in the midst of recession and Facebook, then five years old,
wasn't profitable.
"It was a serious year, and I wore a tie every day as a
reminder," Mr. Zuckerberg wrote. "Today feels a lot like that first
year."
Many people have lost confidence in tech giants' ability to
level the playing field, he said.
Facebook in particular has gained a reputation for being
ruthless in its desire to squash its rivals.
"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," Mr. Zuckerberg wrote.
Mr. Zuckerberg's latest mission lacks the same kind of concrete
goals as prior challenges, which also generally have skewed more
toward individual development, such as his 2015 promise to read a
new book every two weeks.
It isn't clear what it would take for his 2018 personal
challenge to be met and a Facebook spokesman didn't respond to a
request for more information.
Mr. Zuckerberg said the current issues facing the company
touched on subjects like "history, civics, political philosophy,
media, government, and of course technology." He added that he
would be "bringing groups of experts together to discuss and help
work through these topics," but didn't specify the goal of those
conversations or whom he would invite.
"If we're successful this year then we'll end 2018 on a much
better trajectory," he wrote.
Write to Deepa Seetharaman at Deepa.Seetharaman@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
January 04, 2018 17:39 ET (22:39 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2018 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META)
Historical Stock Chart
From Mar 2024 to Apr 2024
Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META)
Historical Stock Chart
From Apr 2023 to Apr 2024